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MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE 



AND OTHER 

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSAYS 



BY 

THOMAS H. HUXLEY 



NEW YORK 

HURST AND COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 



PEEFAOE 



I AM very well aware that the old are prone to regard 
their early performances with much more interest than 
their contemporaries of a younger generation are likely 
to take in them ; moreover, I freely admit that my 
younger contemporaries might employ their time better 
than in perusing the three essays, written thirty-two 
years ago, which occupy the first place in this volume. 
This confession is the more needful, inasmuch as all the 
premises of the argument set forth in ^' Man's Place ia 
J^ature " and most of the conclusions deduced from 
them, are now to be met with among other well-estab- 
lished and, indeed, elementary truths, in the text-books. 

Paradoxical as the statement may seem, however, it 
is just because every well-informed student of biology 
ought to be tempted to throw these essays, and especially 
the second, "' On the Relations of Man to the Lower 
Animals," aside, as a fair mathematician might dis- 
pense with the reperusal of Cocker's arithmetic, that 
I think it worth while to reprint them ; and entertain 
the hope that the story of their origin and early fate 
may not be devoid of a certain antiquarian interest, 
even if it .possess no other. 

In 1854, it became my duty to teach the principles of 
biological science wath especial reference to paleon- 
tology. The first result of addressing myself to the 
business I had taken in hand, was the discovery of my 

3 



4: PREFACE. 

own lamentable ignorance in respect of many parts of 
the vast field of knowledge through which I had under- 
taken to guide others. The second result was a res- 
olution to amend this state of things to the best of my 
ability ; to w^hich end, 1 surveyed the ground ; and hav- 
ing made out what were the main positions to be cap- 
turedj I came to the conclusion that 1 must try to carry 
them by concentrating all the energy I possessed upon 
each in turn. So I set to work to know something of 
my own knowledge of all the various disciplines in- 
cluded under the head of Biology ; and to acquaint 
myselfj at first hand, with the evidence for and against 
the extant solutions of the greater problems of that sci- 
ence. I have reason to believe that wise heads were 
shaken over my apparent divagations — now into the 
province of Physiology or Histology, now into that of 
Comparative Anatomy, of Development, of Zoology, 
of Paleontology, or of Ethnology. But even at this 
time, when I am, or ought to be, so much wiser, I really 
do not see that I could have done better. And my 
method had this great advantage; it involved the cer- 
tainty that somebody would profit by my effort to teach 
properly. Whatever my hearers might do, I myself 
always learned something by lecturing. And to those 
who have experience of what a heart-breaking business 
teaching is — how much the can't-learns and won't-learns 
and don't-learns predominate over the do-iearns — will 
understand the comfort of that reflection. 

Among the many problems which came under my 
consideration, the position of the human species in 
zoological classification was one of the most serious. 
Indeed, at that time, it was a burning question in the 
sense that those who touched it were almost certain to 
burn their fingers severely. It was not so very long 



PREFACE. 5 

since my kind friend Sir William Lawrence, one of the 
ablest men wliom I have known, had been well-nigh 
ostracized for his book ^' On Man/' w^hich now might 
be read in a Sunday-school without surprising anybody ; 
it was only a few years, since the electors to the chair 
of Natural History in a famous northern university 
had refused to in'-ite a very distinguished man to occu- 
py it because he advocated the doctrine of tlie diversity 
of species of mankind, or what w^as called ^^ polygeny.'' 
Even among those who considered man from the point 
of view, not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions 
lay poles asunder. Linnseus had taken one view, 
Cuvier another ; and, among my senior contemporaries, 
men like Lyell, regarded by many as revolutionaries of 
the deepest dye, were strongly opposed to anything 
w^hich tended to break down the barrier between man 
and the rest of the animal world. 

My own mind was by no means definitely made up 
about this matter when, in the year 1857, a paper was 
read before the Linniean Society '^ On the Characters, 
Principles of Division and Primary Groups of the 
Class Mammalia," in which certain anatomical feat- 
ures of the brain w^ere said to be " peculiar to the genus 
Homo," and were made the chief ground for separating 
that genus from all other mammals, and placing him in 
a division, '^ Archencephala," apart from, and superior 
to, all the rest. As these statements did not agree with 
the opinions I had formed, I set to work to reinvestigate 
the subject ; and soon satisfied myself that the struct- 
ures in question were not peculiar to Man, but were 
shared by him with all the higher and many of the 
lower apes. I embarked in no public discussion of 
these matters; but my attention being thus drawn 1o 
them, I studied the whole question of the structural 



6 PREFACE. 

relations of Man to the next lower existing forms, with 
much care. And, of course, I embodied my conclusions 
in my teaching. 

Matters were at this point, when ^' The Origin of 
Species " appeared. The weighty sentence " Light will 
be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (1st 
ed. p. 488) was not only in full harmony with the con- 
clusions at which I had arrived, respecting the structural 
relations of apes and men, but was strongly supported by 
them. And inasmuch as Development and Vertebrate 
Anatomy were not among Mr. Darwin's manj^ spe- 
cialities, it aj)peared to me that I should not be intrud- 
ing on the ground he had made his own, if I dis- 
cussed this part of the general question. In fact, I 
thought that I might probably serve the cause of 
evolution by doing so. 

Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced 
me that the necessity of making things plain to un- 
instructed people, was one of the very best means of 
clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind. So, 
in 1860, I took the Relation of Man to the Lower Ani- 
mals, for the subject of the six lectures to working men 
which it was my duty to deliver. It was also in 1860, 
that this topic was discussed before a jury of experts, at 
the meeting of the British Association at Oxford ; and, 
from that time, a sort of running fight on the same 
subject was carried on, until it culminated at the Cam- 
bridge meeting of the Association in 1862, by my 
friend Sir W. Flower's public demonstration of the ex- 
istence in the apes of those cerebral characters which 
had been said to be peculiar to man. 

" Magna est Veritas et pmevalebit ! " Truth is 
great, certainly, but, considering her greatness, it is 
curious what a long time she is apt to take about 



PREFACE. 7 

prevailing. When, towards the end of 1862, I had 
finished writing ^' Man's Place in I^ature," I could say 
with a good conscience, that my conclusions " had not 
been formed hastily or enunciated crudely." I thought 
I had earned the right to publish them and even fancied 
I might be thanked, rather than reproved, for so doing. 
However in my anxiety to promulgate nothing errone- 
ous, I asked a highly competent anatomist and very 
good friend of mine to look through my proofs and, if 
he could, point out any errors of fact. I was well 
pleased when he returned them without criticism on that 
score; but my satisfaction was speedily dashed by the 
very earnest warning, as to the consequences of pub- 
lication, which my friend^s interest in my welfare led 
him to give. But as I have confessed elsewhere, when 
I was a young man, there was just a little — a mere 
soupgon — in my composition of that tenacity of pur- 
pose Avhich has another name; and I felt sure that all 
the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to me 
as the giving up that which I had resolved to do, upon 
grounds which I conceived to be right. So the book 
came out ; and I must do my friend the justice to say 
that his forecast was completely justified. The Boreas 
of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation 
and ridicule for some years ; and I was even as one of 
the wicked. Indeed, it surprises me, at times, to think 
how any one who had sunk so low could since have 
emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability. Per- 
sonally, like the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby 
legend, I did not feel " one penny the worse." Trans- 
lated into several languages, the book reached a wider 
public than I had ever hoped for ; being largely helped, 
I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which 1 
Uave referred. It has had the honour of being freely 



8 PREFACE. 

utilized, without acknowledgment, by writers of repute ; 
and, finally, it achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia 
of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble 
of the foundations of later knowledge and forgotten. 

To my observation, human nature has not sensibly 
changed during the last thirty years. I doubt not that 
there are truths as plainly obvious and as generally 
denied, as those contained in " Man's Place in ISTature," 
now awaiting enunciation. If there is a young man of 
the present generation, who has taken as much trouble 
as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him 
come out with them, without troubling his head about 
the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. '^ Veritas 
prsevalebit " — some day ; and, even if she does not 
prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and 
the wiser for having tried to help her. And let him 
recollect that such great reward is full payment for all 
his labour and pains. 

" Man's Place in x^ature," perhaps, may still be 
useful as an introduction to the subject ; but, as any 
interest which attaches to it must be mainly historical, 
I have thought it right to leave the essays untouched. 
The history of the long controversy about the structure 
of the brain, following upon the second dissertation, in 
the original edition, however, is omitted. The verdict 
of science has long been pronounced upon the questions 
at issue ; and no good purpose can be served by preserv- 
ing the memory of the details of the suit. 

In many passages, the reader who is acquainted with 
the present state of science, will observe much room 
for addition ; but, in all cases, the supplements 
required, are, I believe, either indifferent to the argu- 
pient or would strengthen it, 



CONTENTS. 



.^^' 



I. 

PAGE 

On the Natural History of the Man-like Apes , 13 

II. 
On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals 72 



/ in. 

On Some Fossil Remains of Man 135 

IV. 

On the Methods and Results of Ethnology [1865] 178 

V. 

On Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology [1871] 214 

VI. 

On the Aryan Question [1890] 229 



\* The first three Essays were published in January; 1863, 
under the title of "Man's Place in Nature"; the fourth Essay 
appeared in the Fortnightly Revieiv. the fifth in the Contempo- 
rary Revietv, and they were published in Critiqves and Addresses. 
The Essay on the Aryan Question appeared in the Nineteenth 
Century for November, 1890, 



MA¥'S PLACE IN KATUKE, 

Advertisement to the Reader. 

The greater part of the substance of the following 
Essays has already been published in the form of Oral 
Discourses, addressed to widely different audiences 
during the past three years. 

Upon the subject of the second E^say, I delivered six 
Lectures to the Working Men in 1860, and two, to the 
members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh 
in 1862. The readiness with which my audience fol- 
lowed my arguments, on these occasions, encourages me 
to hope that I have not committed the error, into 
which working men of science so readily fall, of ob- 
scuring my meaning by unnecessary technicalities : 
while, the length of the period during which the sub- 
ject, under its various aspects, has been present to my 
mind, may suffice to satisfy the Reader that, my con- 
clusions, be they right or be they wrong, have not been 
formed hastily or enunciated crudely. 

T, H. H. 

LiOndon: January, 1863, 



I. 



OK THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MAN- 
LIKE APES. 

Anciej!^t traditions, when tested by the severe pro- 
cesses of modern investigation, commonly enough fade 
away into mere dreams : but it is singular how often the 
dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presag- 
ing a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the 
geologist : the Atlantis was an imagination, but Col- 
umbus found a western world : and though the quaint 
forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in 
the realms of art, creatures approaching man more 
nearly than they in essential structure, and yet as thor- 
ougly brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the mythical 
compound, are now not only known, but notorious. 

I have not met with any notice of one of these Mat^- 
LiKE Apes of earlier date than that contained in Piga- 
fetta's ^' Description of the kingdom of Congo,""^ drawn 
up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor, Eduardo 
Lopez, and published in 1598. The tenth chapter of 
this work is entitled '^ De Animalibus qua? in hac pro- 
vincia reperiuntur," and contains a brief passage to the 

* Regnum Congo : lioc est Vera Descriptio Regni African: 

QUOD TAM AB INCOIJS QUAM LUSITANIS CONGUS APPELLATUR, per 

Philippuni Pio:afettam. olimex Edoardo Lopez acroamatis linsrua 
Italica excerpta. num Latio sermone clonata ab AnRiist. Cassiod. 
Reinio. Iconibus et iraagiiiibns renim memorabilinm quasi 
vivis, opera et industria Joan. Tlieodori et Joan, Israelis de Bry, 
fratrum exornata. Francofurti. mdxcviii. 

13 



14 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



effect that ^^ in the Songan country, on the banks of the 
Zaire, there are miikitucles of apes, which afford great 
delight to the nobles by imitating human gestures." As 
this might apply to almost any kind of apes, I should 
have thought little of it, had not the brothers De Bry, 
whose engravings illustrate the work, thought fit, in 
their eleventh ^' Argumentum," to figure two of these 
" Simia? magnatum delicic'e.'' So much of the plate as 
contains these apes is faithfully copied in the woodcut 




Fig. 1. — Simiae magnatum deliciae. — De Bry, 1598. 

(Fig. 1), and it will be observed that they are tail-less, 
long-armed, and large-eared ; and about the size of 
Chimpanzees. It may be that these apes are as much 
figments of the imagination of the ingenious brothers as 
the winged, two-legged, crocodile-headed dragon which 
adorns the same plate ; or, on the other hand, it may be 
that the artists have constructed their drawings from 
some essentially faithful description of a Gorilla or a 
Chimpanzee. And, in either case, though these figures 



THE MAN-LIKE APES, 15 

are worth a passing notice, the oldest trustworthy and 
definite accounts of any animal of this kind date from 
the lYth century, and are due to an Englishman. 

The first edition of that most amusing old book, 
" Purchas his Pilgrimage/' was published in 1613, and 
therein are to be found many references to the state- 
ments of one whom Purchas terms '' Andrew Battell 
(my neere neighbour, dwelling at Leigh in Essex) who 
served under Manuel Silvera Perera, Governor under 
the King of Spaine, at his city of Saint Paul, and with 
him went f arre into the countrey of Angola" ; and 
again, " my friend, Andrew Battle, who lived in the 
kingdom of Congo many yeares," and who, '' upon 
some quarell betwixt the Portugals (among whom he 
was a sergeant of a band) and him, lived eight or nine 
moneths in the woodes." From this weather-beaten old 
soldier, Purchas was amazed to hear " of a kinde of 
Great Apes, if they might so be termed, of the height of 
a man, but twice as bigge in feature of their limmes, 
with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise 
altogether like men and women in their Avhole bodily 
shape. "^ They lived on such wilde fruits as the trees 
and woods yielded, and in the night time lodged on the 
trees." 

This extract is, however, less detailed and clear in its 
statements than a passage in the third. chapter of the 
second part of another work — " Purchas his Pilgrimes," 
published in 1625, by the same author — which has 
been often, though hardly ever quite rightly, cited. 
The chapter is entitled, " The strange adventures of 
Andrew Battell, of Leigh in Essex, sent by the Port- 
ugals prisoner to iVngola, who lived there and in the 

* " Except this that their legges had no calves." — [Ed. 1626.] 
And in a marginal note, " These great apes are called Pongo's." 



16 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

adionining regions neere eigliteene yeeres." And tlie 
sixth section of this chapter is headed — '^ Of the "Prov- 
inces of Bongo, Calongo, Majomhe, Manikesocke, 
Motimbas : of the Ape Monster Pongo, their hunting : 
Idolatries ; and divers other observations." 

" This province (Calongo) toward the east bordereth upon 
Bongo, and toward the north upon Mayombe, which is nine- 
teen leagues from Longo along the coast. 

" This province of Mayombe is all woods and groves, so over- 
growne that a man may travaile twentie days in the shadow 
without any sunne or heat. Here is no kind of corne nor 
graine, so that the people liveth onely upon plantanes and 
roots of ^mdrie sorts, very good; and nuts; nor any kinde of 
tame cattell, nor hens. 

" But they have great store of elephants' flesh, which they 
greatly esteeme, and many kinds of wild beasts; and great 
store of fish. Here is a great sandy bay, two leagues to the 
northward of Cape Negro,* which is the port of Mayombe. 
Sometimes the Portugals lade logwood in this bay. Here is a 
great river, called Banna: in the winter it hath no barre, be- 
cause the generall winds cause a great sea. But when the 
sunne hath his south declination, then a boat may goe in; for 
then it is smooth because of the raine. This river is very 
great, and hath many ilands and people dwelling in them. The 
woods are so covered with baboones, monkies, apes and par- 
rots, that it will feare any man to travaile in them alone. 
Here are also two kinds of monsters, which are common in 
these woods, and very dangerous. 

" The greatest of these two monsters is called Pongo in their 
language, and the lesser is called Engeco. This Pongo is in all 
proportion like a man; but that he is more like a giant in 
stature than a man; for he is very tall, and hath a man's face, 
hollow-eyed, with long haire upon his browes. His face and 
eares are without haire, and his hands also. His bodie is full 
of haire, but not very thicke; and it is of a dunnish colour. 

" He differeth not from a man but in his legs; for they have 
no calfe. Hee goeth alwaies upon his legs, and carrieth his 
hands clasped in the nape of his necke when he goeth upon 
the ground. They sleepe in the trees, and build shelters for 
the raine. They feed upon fruit that they find in the woods, 
and upon nuts, for they eate no kind of flesh. They cannot 
speake, and have no understanding more than a beast. The 
people of the countrie, when they travaile in the woods make 
fires where they sleepe in the night; and in the morning, when 

* Purchas' note.-^Cape Negro is in 16 degrees south of the 
line. 



THE MAN-LIKE APE^. If 

they are gone, the Pongoes will come and sit about the fire till 
it goeth out; for they have no understanding to lay the wood 
together. They goe many together and kill many negroes that 
travaile in the woods. Many times they fall upon the ele- 
phants which come to feed where they be, and so beate them 
with their clubbed fists, and pieces of wood, that they will 
runne roaring away from them. Those Pongoes are never 
taken alive because they are so strong that ten men cannot 
hold one of them; but yet they take many of their young ones 
with poisoned arrows. 

" The young Pongo hangeth on his mother's belly with his 
hands fast clasped about her, so that when the countrie people 
kill any of the females they take the young one, which hangeth 
fast upon his mother. 

" When they die among themselves, they cover the dead 
with great heaps of boughs and wood, which is commonly 
found in the forest." * 

It does not appear difficult to identify the exact 
region of which Battell speaks. Longo is doubtless the 
name of the place usually spelled Loango on our maps. 
Mayombe still lies some nineteen leagues northward 
from Loango, along the coast ; and Cilongo or Kilonga, 
Manikesocke, and Motimbas are yet registered by geog- 
raphers. The Cape ^egro of Battell, however, cannot 
be the modern Cape Xegro in 16° S., since Loango 
itself is in 4° S. latitude. On the other hand, the 
'"• great river called Banna " corresponds very well with 
the " Camma " and '' Fernand Vas," of modern geog- 
raphers, wdiich form a great delta on this part of the 
African coast. 

'Now this " Camma " country is situated about a 

"* Purchas' marginal note, p. 982: — "The Pongo is a giant 
ape. He told me in conference with him, that one of these 
Pongoes tooke a negro boy of his which lived a moneth with 
them. For they hurt not those which they surprise at un- 
awares, except they look on them; which he avoyded. He said 
their highth was like a man's but their bignesse twice as great. 
I saw the negro boy. What the other monster should be he 
hath forgotten to relate; and these papers came to my hand 
since his death, which, otherwise, in my often conferences, I 
might have learned. Perhaps he meaneth the Pigmy Pongo 
killers mentioned." 



18 maN'B place in nato^e. 

degree and a half soutli of tlie Equator^ while a feW 
miles to the north of the line lies the Gaboon, and a 
degree or so north of that, the Money River — both well 
known to modern naturalists as localities where the 
largest of man-like Apes has been obtained. Moreover, 
at the present day, the word Engeco, or IST'schego, is 
applied by the natives of ^these regions to the smaller of 
the two great Apes which inhabit them ; so that there 
can be no rational doubt that Andrew Battell spoke of 
that which he knew of his own knowledge, or, at any 
rate, by immediate report from the natives of Western 
Africa. The ^^ Engeco," however, is that ^^ other mon- 
ster " whose nature Battell " forgot to relate," while the 
name '' Pongo " — applied to the animals whose char- 
acters and habits are so fully and carefully described — 
seems to have died out, at least in its primitive form 
and signification. Indeed, there is evidence that not 
only in Battell's time, but up to a very recent date, it 
was used in a totally different sense from that in which 
he employs it. 

Eor example, the second chapter of Purchas' work, 
which I have just quoted, contains '' A Description and 
Historicall Declaration of the Golden Kingdom of 
Guinea, &c. &c. Translated from the Dutch, and com- 
pared also with the Latin," wherein it is stated (p. 986) 
that— 

" The River Gaboon lyeth about fifteen miles northward from 
Rio de Angra, and eight miles northward from Cape de Lope 
Gonsalvez (Cape Lopez), and is right under the Equinoctial 
line, about fifteene miles from St. Thomas, and is a great land, 
well and easily to be knowne. At the mouth of the river there 
lieth a sand, three or foure fathoms deepe, whereon it beateth 
mightily with the streame which runneth out of the river into, 
the sea. This river, in the mouth thereof, is at least four 
miles broad; but when you are about the Hand called Pongo, 
it is not above two miles broad. ... On both sides the 

river there standeth many trees The Hand 

called Pongo, which hath a monstrous high hill." 



The Man-like apes. 19 

The Frencli naval officers, whose letters are appended 
to the late M. Isidore Geoff. Saint Hilaire's excellent 
essay on the Gorilla,^ note in similar terms the width of 
the Gaboon, the trees that line its banks down to the 
water's edge, and the strong cnrrent that sets out of it. 
They describe tAvo islands in its estuary; — one low, 
called Perroquet ; the other high, presenting three 
conical hills, called Coniquet ; and one of them, M. 
Franquet, express^.y states that, formerly, the Chief of 
Coniquet w^as called Menl-Pongo, meaning thereby 
Lord of Pongo; and that the N'Pongues (as, in agree- 
ment with Dr. Savage, he affirms the natives call them- 
selves) term the estuary of the Gaboon itself N' Pongo. 

It is so easy, in dealing with savages, to misunder- 
stand their applications of words to things, that one is at 
first inclined to suspect Battell of having confounded 
the name of this region, where his " greater monster " 
still abounds, with the name of the animal itself. But 
he is so right about other matters (including the name 
of the " lesser monster ") that one is loth to suspect 
the old traveller of error ; and, on the other hand, we 
shall find that a voyager of a hundred years' later date 
speaks of the name " Boggoe," as applied to a great Ape, 
by the inhabitants of quite another part of Africa 
— Sierra Leone. 

But I must leave this question to be settled by phil- 
ologers and travellers; and I should hardly have dwelt 
so long upon it except for the curious part played by 
this w^ord " Pongo " in the later history of the man-like 
Apes. 

The generation which succeeded Battell saw the first 
of the man-like Apes which was ever brought to 
Europe, or, at any rate, whose visit found a historian. 

* Archives du Museum, Tome X. 



% MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

In the third book of Tulpius' ^' Observations Medicse/' 
published in 1641, the 56th chapter or section is de- 
voted to v^hat he calls Saiyrus indicus, '' called by the 
Indians Orang-autang or Man-of -the- Woods, and by the 
Africans Quoias Morron." He gives a very good 
figure, evidently from the life, of the specimen of this 
animal, ^' nostra memoria ex Angola delatum," pre- 
sented to Frederick Henry Prince of Orange. Tulpius 

jffomo Sylveftris. 
Vran^ Ou tariff. 




Fig. 2.— The Orang of Tulpius, 1641. 

says it was as big as a child of three years old, and as 
stout as one of six years : and that its back was covered 
with black hair. It is plainly a young Chimpanzee. 

In the meanwhile, the existence of other Asiatic, 
man-like Apes became known, but at first in a very 
mythical fashion. • Thus Bontius (1658) gives an alto- 
gether fabulous and ridiculous account and figure of au 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 21 

animal which he calls '' Orang-outang " ; and though 
he says '' vicli Ego cujus effigiem hie exhibeo," the said 
effigies (see Fig. 6 for Hoppius' copy of it) is nothing 
but a very hairy woman of rather comely aspect, and 
with proportions and feet wholly human. The judi- 
cious English anatomist, Tyson, was justified in say- 
ing of this description by Bontius, " I confess I do 
mistrust the whole rejoresentation." 

It is to the last-mentioned writer, and his coadjutor 
Cowper, that we owe the first account of a man-like ape 
which has any pretensions to scientific accuracy and 
completeness. The treatise entitled, '' Ovang-outang, 
sive Homo Sylvestris; or the Anatomy of a Pygmie 
compared with that of a Monkey^ an Ape, and a Man/' 
published by the Royal Society in 1699, is, indeed, a 
work of remarkable merit, and has, in some respects, 
served as a model to subsequent inquirers. This '' Pyg- 
mie," Tyson tells us ^' was brought from Angola, in 
Africa; but was first taken a great deal higher up the 
country " ; its hair " was of a coal-black colour and 
strait," and " when it went as a quadruped on all four, 
'twas awkwardly ; not placing the palm of the hand flat 
to the ground, but it walk'd upon its knuckles, as T 
observed it to do when weak and had not strength 
enough to support its body." — Erom the top of the head 
to the heel oi the foot, in a straight line, it measured 
twenty-six inches." 

These characters, even without Tyson's good figure 
(Figs. 3 and 4), would have been sufficient to prove his 
" Pygmie " to be a young Chimpanzee. But the op- 
portunity of examining the skeleton of the very animal 
Tyson anatomised having most unexpectedly presented 
itself to me, I am able to bear independent testimony to 
its being a veritable Troglodyies niger/' though still 
* I am indebted to Dr. Wright, of Cheltenham, whose 



22 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



very young. Altlioiigli fully appreciating the resem- 
blances between his Pygmie and Man, Tyson by no 
means overlooked the differences between the two, and 
he concludes his memoir by summing up first, the points 
in which ^^ the Ourang-outang or Pygmie more resem- 
bled a Man than Apes and Monkeys do/' under forty- 




FiG. 3. — The " Pygmie " reduced from Tyson's figure 1, 1699. 

seven distinct heads; and then giving, in thirty-four 
similar brief j^aragraphs, the respects in which '^ the 

paleontological labours are so well known, for bringing this 
interesting relic to my knowledge. Tyson's grand-daughter, 
it appears, married Dr. Allardyce, a physician of repute in 
Cheltenham, and brought, as part of her dowry, the skeleton 
of the " Pygmie." Dr. Allardyce presented it to the Chelten- 
ham Museum, and, through the good offices of my friend Dr. 
Wright, the authorities of the Museum have permitted me to 
borrow, what is, perhaps, its most remarkable ornament. 



THE Man-like apes. 



M 



Ourang-outang or Pvgmie differ'd from a man and re- 
sembled more the Ape and Monkey kind." 

After a careful survey of the literature of the subject 
extant in his time, our author arrives at the conclusion 
that his '^ Pygmie " is identical neither with the 
Orangs of Tulpius and Bontius, nor with the Quoias 




Fig. 4. — The " Pygmie " reduced from Tyson's figure 2, 1699. 

Morrou of Dapper (or rather of Tulpius), the Barris 
of d'Arcos, nor with the Pongo of Battell; but that it 
is a species of ape probably identical with the Pygmies 
of the Ancients, and says Tyson, though it " does so 
much resemble a Man in many of its parts, more 
than any of the ai^e kind, or any other animal in the 



^4 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Avorld, tliat I know of : yet by no means do I look upon it 
as the product of a 7nixt generation — 'tis a Brute- 
Animal sui generis, and a particular species of Ape. 

The name of '' Chimpanzee/' by which one of the 
African Apes is now so well known, appears to have 
come into lise in the first half of the eighteenth century, 
but the only important addition made, in that period, 
to our acquaintance with the man-like apes of Africa is 
contained in '^ A E'ew Voyage to Guinea," by William 
Smith, which bears the date 1744, 

In describing the animals of Sierra Leone, p. 51, 
this writer says : — 

" I shall next describe a strange sort of animal, called by 
the white men in this country Mandrill,* but why it is so 
called I know not, nor did I ever hear the name before, neither 
can those who call them so tell, except it be for their near re- 
semblance of a human creature, though nothing at all like an 
Ape. Their bodies, when full grown, are as big in circum- 
ference as a middle-sized man's — their legs much shorter, and 
their feet larger; their arms and hands in proportion. The 
head is monstrously big, and the face broad and flat, without 
any other hair but the eyebrows; the nose very small, the 
mouth wide, and the lips thin. The face, v/hich is covered by 
a white skin, is monstrously ugly, being all over wrinkled as 
with old age; the teeth broad and yellow; the hands have no 
more hair than the face, but the same v/hite skin, though all 
the rest of the body is covered with long black hair, like a 
bear. They never go upon all-fours, like apes; but cry, when 
vexed or teased, just like children. . . . 

" When I was at Sherbro, one Mr. Cum.merbus, whom I shall 
have occasion hereafter to mention, made me a present of one 

* '*■ Mandrill " seems to signify a " man-like ape," the word 
" Drill " or " Dril " having been anciently employed in Eng- 
land to denote an Ape or Baboon. Thus in the fifth edition of 
Blount's " Glossographia, or a Dictionary interpreting the hard 
words of whatsoever language now used in our refined English 
tongue . . . very useful for all such as desire to under- 
stand what they read," published in 1681, I find, " Dril — a 
stonecutter's tool wherewith he bores little holes in marble, 
&c. Also a large overgrown Aps and Baboon, so called." 
" Drill " is used in the same sense in Charleston's Onomasticon 
Zoicon, 1668. The singular etymology of the word given by 
Buffon seems hardly a probable one. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 



25 



of these strange animals, which are called by the natives 
Boggoe: it was a she-cub, of six months' age, but even then 
larger than a Baboon. I gave it in charge to one of the slaves, 
who knew how to feed and nurse it, being a very tender sort 
of animal; but whenever I went off the deck the sailors began 
to teaze it — some loved to see its tears and hear it cry; others 
hated its snotty nose; one who hurt it, being checked by the 
negro that took care of it, told the slave he was very fond of 
his country-woman, and asked him if he should not like her 
for a wife. To which the slave very readily replied, ' No, this 
no my wife; this a white woman — this fit wife for you.' This 
unlucky wit of the negro's, I fancy, hastened its death, for 
next morning it was found dead under the windlass." 




Fig. 5.— Facsimile of William Smith's figure of the 
drill," 1744. 



Man- 



William Smith's " llandrill/' or " Boggoe/' as his 
description and figure testify, was, without doubt, a 
Chimpanzee. 

Linnseus knew nothing, of his own observation of the 
man-like Apes of either Africa or Asia, but a disserta- 
tion by his pupil Hoppius in the ^^ Amoenitates Acad- 
emicse " (VI. '' AnthropomorjDha ") may be regarded 
as embodying his views respecting these animals. 

The dissertation is illustrated by a plate, of which 



26 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



the accompanying woodcut, Fig. 6, is a reduced copy. 
The figures are entitled (from left to right) 1. Trog- 
loyta Bontii; 2. Lucifer Aldrovandi; 3. Satyr us 
Tulpii; 4. Pygmceus Edwardi. The first is a bad copy 
of Bontius' fictitious '^ Ourang-outang," in whose ex- 
istence, however, Linnseus appears to have fully be- 
lieved ; for in the standard edition of the '^ System a 
Naturae, '^ it is enumerated as a second species of Homo ; 
" H. nocturnus." Lucifer Aldrovandi is a copy of a 
figure in Aldrovandus, '^ De Quadrupedibus digitatis 
viviparis," Lib. 2, p. 249 (1645) entitled " Cercopithe- 




FiG. 6. — The Anthropomorplia of Linnseiis. 

cus forma3 rane Barhilius vocatus et originem a china 
ducebat." Hoppius is of opinion that this may be one of 
that cat-tailed people, of whom Nicolaus Koping affirms 
that they eat a boat's crew, " gubernator navis '' and all ! 
In the '^ Systema x^aturee " Linnaeus calls it in a note 
Llomo caudahis, and seems inclined to regard it as a 
third species of man. According to Temminck, Satyrus 
Tulpii is a copy of the figure of a Chimpanzee published 
by Scotin in 1738, which I have not seen. It is the 
Satyrus indicus of the '' Systema I^aturse,'' and is 
regarded by Linnaeus as possibly a distinct species froni 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 27 

Satyrus sylvestris. The last, named Pygmceus Edivardi 
is copied from the figure of a young ^^ Man of the 
Woods," or true Orang-Utan, given in Edwards' 
'' Gleanings of Natural History " (1758). 

Buffon was more fortunate than his great rival. E^ot 
only had he the rare opportunity of examining a 
young Chimpanzee in the living state, but he became 
possessed of an adult Asiatic man-like Ape — the first 
and the last adult specimen of any of these animals 
brought to Europe for many years. With the valuable 
assistance of Daubenton, Buffon gave an excellent de- 
scription of this creature, which, from its singular 
proportions, he termed the long-armed Ape, or Gibbon. 
It is the modern Hylohates lar. 

Thus Avhen, in 1766, Buffon wrote the fourteenth 
volume of his great work, he was personally familiar 
with the young of one kind of African man-like Ape, 
and with the adult of an Asiatic species — ^while the 
Orang-Utan and the Mandrill of Smith were known to 
him by report. Furthermore, the x\bbe Prevost had 
translated a good deal of Purchas ' '' Pilgrims " into 
French, in his '^ Histoire generale des Voyages " 
(1748), and there Buffon found a version of Andrew 
BattelFs account of the Pongo and the Engeco. All 
these data Buffon attempts to weld together into har- 
mony in this chapter entitled '^ Les Orang-outangs ou le 
Pongo et le Jocko." To this title the following note is 
appended : — 

"Orang-outang nom de cet animal aux Indes orientales: 
Pongo nom de cet animal a Lowando Province de Congo. 

" Jocko, Enjocko, nom de cet animal a Congo que nous avons 
adopte. En est I'article que nous avons retranche." 

Thus it was that iVndrew BattelPs '' Engeco " became 
metamorphosed into " Jocko," and, in the latter shape, 
was spread all over the world^ in consequence of the 



28 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

extensive popularity of Buffon's works. Tlie Abbe 
Prevost and Buffon between them however, did a good 
deal more disfigurement to Batteil's sober account than 
" cutting off an article." Thus Battell's statement that 
the Pongos " cannot speake, and have no understanding 
more than a beast," is rendered by Buffon, '" qu'il ne 
pent parler quoiqiiil ait plus cV eiitendemeiit que les 
autres animaux; " and again, Purchas' affirmation, 
"" He told me in conference with him, that one of these 
Pongos tooke a negro boy of his which lived a moneth 
with them," stands in the French version, '^ un pongo 
lui enleva un petit negre qui passa un an entier dans la 
societe de ces animaux." 

After quoting the account of the great Pongo, Buffon 
justly remarks, that all the ^^ Jockos " and ^' Orangs " 
hitherto brought to Europe were young ; and he suggests 
that, in their adult condition, they might be as big as 
the Pongo or " great Orang ;" so that, provisionally, he 
regarded the Jockos, Orangs, and Pongos as all of one 
species. And perhaps this was as much as the state of 
knowledge at the time w^arranted. But how it came 
about that Buffon failed to perceive the similarity of 
Smith's '^ Mandrill " to his own ^' Jocko," and con- 
founded the former with so totally different a creature 
as the blue-faced Baboon, is not so easily intelligible. 

Twenty years later Buffon changed his opinion,"^ and 
expressed his belief that the Orangs constituted a genus 
with two species, — a large one, the Pongo of Battell, 
and a small one, the Jocko: that the small one (Jocko) 
is the East Indian Orang ; and that the young animals 
from Africa, observed by himself and Tulpius, are 
simply young Pongos. 

In the meanwhile, the Dutch naturalist, Yosmaer, 
* liistqire Naturelle, Suppl, Tome 7eme, 1789. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. §9 

gave, in 1Y78, a very good account and figure of a young 
Orang, brought alive to Holland, and his countryman, 
the famous anatomist, Peter Camper, published (1779) 
an essay on the Orang-Utan of similar value to that of 
Tyson on the Chimpanzee. He dissected several females 
and a male, all of which, from the state of their skeleton 
and their dentition, he justly supposes to have been 
young. However, judging by the analogy of man, he 
concludes that they could not have exceeded four feet 
in height in the adult condition. Furthermore, he is 
very clear as to the specific distinctness of the true East 
Indian Orang. 

^' The Orang," says he, ^^ differs not only from the 
Pigmy of Tyson and from the Orang of Tulpius by its 
peculiar colour and its long toes, but also by its whole 
external form. Its arms, its hands, and its feet are 
longer, while the thumbs, on the contrary, are much 
shorter, and the great toes much smaller in propor- 
tion." ^ And again, '^ The true Orang, that is to say, 
that of Asia, that of Borneo, is consequently not the 
Pithecus, or tail-less Ape, which the Greeks, and 
especially Galen, have described. It is neither the 
Pongo nor the Jocko, nor the Orang of Tulpius, nor the 
Pigmy of Tyson, — it is an animal of a peculiar species, 
as I shall prove in the clearest manner by the organs of 
voice and the skeleton in the following chapters " (I. c. 
p. 64). 

A few years later, M. Radermacher, who held a high 

office in the Government of the Dutch dominions in 

India, and was an active member of the Batavian 

Society of Arts and Sciences, published, in the second 

part of the Transactions of that Society,f a Description 

* Camper, CEuvres, \., p. 56, 

t Verhandelincfen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap. Tweede 
Deel. Derde Druk. 1826. 



80 MAN'S PLACE IN NATtJUfi. 

of the Island of Borneo, which was written between the 
years 1779 and 1781, and, among much other interest- 
ing matter, contains some notes upon the Orang. The 
small sort of Orang-Utan, viz. that of Vosmaer and of 
Edwards, he says, is found only in Borneo, and chiefly 
about Banjermassing, Mampauwa, and Landak. Of 
these he had seen some fifty during his residence in the 
Indies ; but none exceeded 2^ feet in length. The larger 
sort, often regarded as a chima.Ta, continues Rader- 
macher, would perhaps long have remained so, had it 
not been for the exertions of the Resident at Rembang, 
M. Palm, who, on returning from Landak towards Pon- 
tiana, shot one, and forwarded it to Batavia in spirit, 
for transmission to Europe. 

Palm's letter describing the capture runs thus: — 
'^ Herewith I send your Excellency, contrary to all 
expectation (since long ago I offered more than a 
hundred ducats to the natives for an Orang-Utan of 
four or fiYQ feet high) an Orang which I heard of this 
morning about eight o'clock. For a long time we did 
our best to take the frightful beast alive in the dense 
forest about half way to Landak. We forgot even to 
eat, so anxious were we not to let him escape ; but it was 
necessary to take care that he did not revenge himself, 
as he kept continually breaking off heavy pieces of wood 
and green branches, and dashing them at us. This game 
lasted till four o'clock in the afternoon, when we deter- 
mined to shoot him; in which I succeeded very well, 
and indeed better than I ever shot from a boat before ; 
for the bullet went just into the side of his chest, so that 
he was not much damaged. We got him into the prow 
still living, and bound him fast, and next morning he 
died of his wounds. All Pantiana came on board to see 
him when we arrived." Palm gives his height from 
the head to the heel as 49 inches. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 31 

A very intelligent German officer, Baron Von 
Wurmb, who at this time held a post in the Dutch East 
India service, and was Secretary of the Batavian 
Society, studied this animal, and his careful description 
of it, entitled '^ Beschrijving van der Groote Borneosche 
Orang-outang of de Oost-Indische Pongo," is contained 
in the same volume of the Batavian Society's Transac- 
tions. After Von Wurmb had drawn up his description 
he states, in a letter dated Batavia, Feb. 18, 1781,"^ that 
the specimen was sent to Europe in brandy to be placed 
in the collection of the Prince of Orange ; ^^ unfortu- 
nately," he continues, '' we hear that the ship has been 
wrecked." Von Wurmb died in the course of the year 
1781, the letter in which this passage occurs being the 
last he wrote; but in his posthumous papers, published 
in the fourth part of the Transactions of the Batavian 
Society, there is a brief description, with measurements, 
of a female Pongo four feet high. 

Did either of these original specimens, on which Von 
Wurmb's descriptions are based, ever reach Europe ? It 
is commonly supposed that they did ; but I doubt the 
fact. For, appended to the memoir '' De I'Ourang- 
outang," in the collected edition of Camper's works, 
tome i., pp. %4r-QQ, is a note by Camper himself, refer- 
ring to Von Wurmb's papers, and continuing thus: — 
'^ Heretofore, this kind of ape had never been known in 
Europe. Radermacher has had the kindness to send me 
the skull of one of these animals, which measured fifty- 
three inches, or four feet five inches, in height. I have 
sent some sketches of it to M. Soemmering at Mayence, 
which are better calculated, however, to give an idea of 
the form than of the real size of the parts." 

* " Briefe des Herrn v. Wurmb und des H. Baron von ^Voll- 
zogen. Gotha, 1794." 



32 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

These sketches have been reproduced bv Fischer and 
by Liicge, and bear date 1783, Soemmering having 
received them in 1Y84. Had either of Yon Wurmb's 
specimens reached Holland, they would hardly have 
been unknown at this time to Camper, who, however, 
goes on to say: — '^ It appears that since this, some more 
of these monsters have been captured, for an entire 
skeleton, very badly set up, which had been sent to the 
Museum of the Prince of Orange, and which I saw only 
on the 2Yth of June, 1784, was more than four feet 
high. I examined this skeleton again on the 19th 




Fig. 7. — The Pongo Skull, sent by Radermacher to Camper, 
after Camper's original sketches, as reproduced by Lucse. 

December, 1785, after it had been excellently put to 
rights by the ingenious Onymus.'' 

It appears evident, then, that this skeleton, w^hich is 
doubtless that which has always gone by the name of 
Wurmb's Pongo, is not that of the animal described 
by him, though unquestionably similar in all essential 
points. 

Camper proceeds to note some of the most important 
features of this skeleton ; promises to describe it in 
detail by-and-bye; and is evidently in doubt as to the 



THE MAN-LIKfi APES. 33 

relation of tliis great '' Pongo '' to bis ^^ petit Orang." 
The promised further investigations were never car- 
ried out; and so it happened that the Pongo of Von 
Wurmb took its place by the side of the Chimpanzee, 
Gibbon, and Orang as a fourth and colossal species of 
man-like Ape. And indeed nothing could look much 
less like the Chimpanzees or the Orangs, then known, 
than the Pongo ; for all the specimens of Chimpanzee 
and Orang which had been observed were small of 
stature, singularly human in aspect, gentle and docile ; 
while Wurmb's Pongo was a monster almost twice their 
size, of vast strength and fierceness, and very brutal in 
expression ; its great projecting muzzle, armed with 
strong teeth, being further disfigured by the outgrowth 
of the cheeks into fleshy lobes. 

Eventually, in accordance with the usual marauding 
habits of the Revolutionary armies, the " Pongo " skele- 
ton was carried away from Holland into France, and 
notices of it, expressly intended to demonstrate its 
entire distinctness from the Orang and its affinity with 
the baboons, were given, in 1798, by Geoffrey St, 
Hilaire and Cuvier. 

Even in Cuvier's '' Tableau Elementaire," and in 
the first edition of his great work, the ^' Pegiie Animal," 
the " Pongo " is classed as a species of Baboon. How- 
ever, so early as 1818, it appears that Cuvier saw reason 
to alter this opinion, and to adopt the view suggested 
several years before by Blumenbach,"' and after him by 
Tilesius, that the Bornean Pongo is simply an adult 
Orang. In 1824, Rudolphi demonstrated, by the condi- 
tion of the dentition, more fully and completely than 

* See Bliimenbach AbMlclungen Naturhistorichen Gegen- 
stande, No. 12, 1810; and Tilesius, Naturhistoriche FrUchte der 
ersten Kaiserlich-Russischen E'rdumsegelung, p. 115, 1813. 



U MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

liad been done by his predecessors, tbat tbe OrangS 
described np to that time were all young animals, and 
that the skull and teeth of the adult would probably 
be such as those seen in the Pongo of Wurmb. In the 
second edition of the " Eegne Animal " (1829), Cuvier 
infers, from the " proportions of all the parts " and 
" the arrangements of the foramina and sutures of the 
head," that the Pongo is the adult of the Orang-Utan, 
" at least of a very closely allied species," and this con- 
clusion was eventually placed beyond all doubt by Pro- 
fessor Owen's Memoir published in the " Zoological 
Transactions " for 1835, and by Temminck in his 
'^ Monographies de Mammalogie." Temminck's memoir 
is remarkable for the completeness of the evidence 
which it affords as to the modification which the form of 
the Orang undergoes according to age and sex. Tiede- 
mann first published an account of the brain of the 
young Orang, while Sandifort, Miiller and Schlegel, 
described the muscles and the viscera of the adult, and 
gave the earliest detailed and trustworthy history of 
the habits of the great Indian Ape in a state of nature ; 
and as important -additions have been made by later 
observers, we are at this moment better acquainted 
with the adult of the Orang-Utan, than with that of 
any of the other greater man-like Apes. 

It is certainly the Pongo of Wurmb ;^ and it is as 
certainly not the Pongo of Battell, seeing that the 
Orang-Utan is entirely confined to the great Asiatic 
islands of Borneo and Sumatra. 

And while the progress of discovery thus cleai;ed up 
the history of the Orang, it also became established that 
the only other man-like Apes in the eastern world were 

* Speaking broadly and without prejudice to the question, 
whether there be more than one species of Orang. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 35 

tlie various species of Gibbon — Apes of smaller stature, 
and therefore attracting less attention than the Orangs, 
though they are spread over a much wider range of 
country, and are hence more accessible to observation. 

Although the geographical area inhabited by the 
'' Pongo " and " Engeco " of Battell is so much nearer 
to Europe than that in which the Orang and Gibbon are 
found, our acquaintance with the African Apes has 
been of slower growth ; indeed, it is only within the last 
few years that the truthful story of the old English 
adventurer has been rendered fully intelligible. It was 
not until 1835 that the skeleton of the adult Chim- 
panzee became known, by the publication of Professor 
Owen's above-mentioned very excellent memoir " On 
the Osteology of the Chimpanzee and Orang," in the 
Zoological Transactions — a memoir which, by the accur- 
acy of its descriptions, the carefulness of its compari- 
sons, and the excellence of its figures, made an epoch in 
the history of our knowledge of the bony framework, 
not only of the Chimpanzee, but of all the anthropoid 
Apes. 

By the investigations herein detailed, it became evi- 
dent that the old Chimpanzee acquired a size and aspect 
as different from those of the young known to Tyson, to 
Buffon, and to Traill, as those of the old Orang from 
the young Orang; and the subsequent very important 
researches of Messrs. Savage and AVyman, the American 
missionary and anatomist, have not only confirmed this 
conclusion, but have added many new details."^ 

* See " Observations on the external ctiaracters and habits of 
the Troglodytes niger, by Thomas N. Savage, M. D., and on Its 
organization, by Jeffries Wyman, M. D.," Boston Journal of 
Natural History, vol. iv. 1843-4; and "External characters, 
habits, and osteology of Troglodytes Gorilla," by the same au- 
thors, ibid. vol. v. 1847. 



ge MAN^S PLACE IN NATtlRfi. 

One of the most interesting among the many valuable 
discoveries made by Dr. Thomas Savage is the fact, that 
the natives in the Gaboon country at the present day, 
apply to the Chimpanzee a name—" Enche-eko "^ 
which is obviously identical with the " Engeko " of 
Battell; a discovery which has been confirmed by all 
later inquirers. Battell's " lesser monster '' being thus 
proved to be a veritable existence, of course a strong 
presumption arose that his " greater monster," the 
" Pongo," w^ould sooner or later be discovered. And, 
indeed, a modern traveller, Bowdich, had in 1819, 
found strong evidence, among the natives, of the 
existence of a second great Ape, called the " Ingena," 
" five feet high, and four across the shoulders," the 
builder of a rude house, on the outside of which it 
slept. 

In 1847, Dr. Savage had the good fortune to make 
another and most important addition to our knowledge 
of the man-like Apes ; for, being unexpectedly detained 
at the Gaboon river, he saw in the house of the Rev. Mr. 
Wilson, a missionary resident there, " a skull repre- 
sented by the natives to be a monkey-like animal, re- 
markable for its size, ferocity, and habits." From the 
contour of the skull, and the information derived from 
several intelligent natives, " I was induced," says Dr. 
Savage (using the term Orang in its old general sense) 
" to believe that it belonged to a new species of Orang. 
I expressed this opinion to Mr. Wilson, with a desire 
for further investigation ; and, if possible, to decide the 
point by the inspection of a specimen alive or dead." 
The result of the combined exertions of Messrs. Savage 
and Wilson was not only the obtaining of a very full 
account of the habits of this new creature, but a still 
more important service to science, the enabling the 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 37 

excellent American anatomist already mentioned, Pro- 
fessor Wyman, to describe, from ample materials, the 
distinctive osteological characters of the new form. 
This animal was called by the natives of the Gaboon 
"■ Enge-ena," a name obviously identical with the '' In- 
gena " of Bowdich ; and Dr. Savage arrived at the con- 
viction that this last discovered of all the great Apes 
was the long sought " Pongo " of Battell. 

The justice of this conclusion, indeed, is beyond doubt 
■ — for not only does the " Enge-ena " agree with Bat- 
tell's " greater monster " in its hollow eyes, its great 
stature, and its dun or iron-grey colour, but the only 
other man-like Ape which inhabits these latitudes — the 
Chimpanzee — is at once identified, by its smaller size, 
as the " lesser monster " and is excluded from any pos- 
sibility of being the " Pongo " by the fact that it is 
black and not dun, to say nothing of the important cir- 
cumstance already mentioned that it still retains the 
name of " Engeko," or '^ Enche-eko," by which Battell 
knew it. 

In seeking for a specific name for the ^' Enge-ena," 
however, Dr. Savage wisely avoided the much misused 
^' Pongo " ; but finding in the ancient Perij^lus of Han- 
no the word " Gorilla '' applied to certain hairy savage 
people, discovered by the Carthaginian voyager in an 
island on the African coast, he attached the specific 
name '' Gorilla " to his new ape, whence arises its pres- 
ent well-known appellation. But Dr. Savage, more cau- 
tious than some of his successors by no means identifies 
his ape with Hanno's '^ wild men." He merely says 
that the latter were " probably one of the species of the 
Orange;" and I quite agree with M. Brulle, that there is 
no ground for identifying the modern ^' Gorilla " v.^ith 
that of the Carthaginian admiral. 



38 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Since the memoir of Savage and Wjman was pub- 
lished, the skeleton of the Gorilla has been investigated 
by Professor Owen and by the late Professor Duver- 
noy, of the Jardin des Plantes, the latter having fur- 
ther supplied a valuable account of the muscular system 
and of many of the other soft parts ; while African 
missionaries and travellers have confirmed and ex- 
panded the account originally given of the habits of 
this great man-like Ape, which has had the singular 
fortune of being the first to be made known to the 
general world and the last to be scientifically investi- 
gated. 

Two centuries and a half have passed away since 
Battell told his stories about the ^^ greater " and the 
'^ lesser monsters " to Purchas, and it has taken nearly 
that time to arrive at the clear result that there are 
four distinct kinds of Anthropoids — in Eastern Asia, 
the Gibbons and the Orangs; in Western Africa, the 
Chimpanzees and the Gorilla. 

The man-like Apes, the history of the discovery of 
which has just been detailed^ have certain characters of 
structure and of distribution in common. Thus thej^ 
all have the same number of teeth as man — possessing 
four incisors, two canines, four false molars, and six 
true molars in each jaw, or 32 teeth in all, in the adult 
condition; while the milk dentition consists of 20 teeth 
— or four incisors, two canines, and four molars in each 
jaw. They are what are called catarrhine Apes — that 
is, their nostrils have a narrow partition and look down- 
wards; and, furthermore, their arms are always longer 
than their legs, the difference being sometimes greater 
and sometimes less ; so that if the four were arranged 
in the order of the length of their arms in proportion to 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 39 

tliat of their legs, we should have this series — Orang 
(1|— 1), Gibbon (1^—1), Gorilla (1;} — 1), Chim- 
panzee (1 — 1). In all, the fore limbs are terminated 
by hands, provided with longer or shorter thumbs; 
while the great toe of the foot, always smaller than in 
Man, is far more movable than in him and can be op- 
posed, like a thumb, to the rest of the foot. 'None of 
these apes have tails, and none of them possess the cheek- 
pouches common among monkeys. Finally, they are all 
inhabitants of the old world. 

The Gibbons are the smallest, slenderest, and longest- 
limbed of the man-like Apes; their arms are longer in 
]3roportion to their bodies than those of any of the other 
man-like Apes, so that they can touch the ground when 
erect; their hands are longer than their feet, and they 
are the only Anthropoids which possess callosities like 
the lower monkeys. They are variously coloured. The 
Orangs have arms which reach to the ankles in the 
erect position of the animal ; their thumbs and great toes 
are very short, and their feet are longer than their 
hands. They are covered with reddish brown hair, and 
the sides of the face, in adult males, are commonly 
produced into two crescentic, flexible excrescences, like 
fatty tumours. The Chimpanzees have arms which 
reach below the knees; they have large thumbs and 
great toes; their hands are longer than their feet; and 
their hair is black, while the skin of the face is pale. 
The Gorilla, lastly, has arms which reach to the middle 
of the leg, large thumbs and great toes, feet longer 
than the hands, a black face, and dark-gTay or dun hair. 

For the purpose which I have at present in view, it is 
unnecessary that I should enter into any further 
minutiae respecting the distinctive characters of the 
genera and species into which these man-like Apes are 



40 MaN-s place in nature. 

divided by naturalists. Suffice it to say, that the 
Orangs and the Gibbons constitute the distinct genera, 
Simia and Hylobates; while the Chimpanzees and Gor- 
illas are by some regarded simply as distinct species of 
one genus, Troglodytes ; by others as distinct genera 
— Troglodytes being reserved for the Chimpanzees, and 
Gorilla for the Enge-ena or Pongo. 

Sound knowledge respecting the habits and mode of 
life of the man-like Apes has been even more difficult of 
attainment than correct information regarding their 
structure. 

Once in a generation, a Wallace may be found 
physically, mentally, and morally qualified to w^ander 
unscathed through the tropical wilds of America and of 
Asia ; to form magnificent collections as he wanders, 
and withal to think out sagaciously the conclu- 
sions suggested by his collections : but, to the ordinary 
explorer or collector, the dense forests of equatorial Asia 
and Africa, which constitute the favourite habitation of 
the Orang, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla, present 
difficulties of no ordinary magnitude ; and the man who 
risks his life by even a short visit to the malarious 
shores of those regions may well be excused if he shrinks 
from facing the dangers of the interior ; if he contents 
himself with stimulating the industry of the better 
seasoned natives, and collecting and collating the more 
or less mythical reports and traditions with which they 
are too ready to supply him. 

In such a manner most of the earlier accounts of the 
habits of the man-like Apes originated; and even now 'a 
good deal of what passes current must be admitted to 
have no very safe foundation. The best information 
we possess is that, based almost wholly on direct Euro- 
pean testimony, respecting the Gibbons ; the next best 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 41 

evidence relates to the Orangs; while our knowledge of 
the habits of the Chimpanzee and the Gorilla stands 
much in need of support and enlargement by additional 
testimony from instructed European eye-w^itnesses. 

It will therefore be convenient in endeavouring to 
fomi a notion of what we are justified in believing 
about these animals, to commence with the best known 
man-like Apes, the Gibbons and Orangs; and to make 
use of the perfectly trustworthy information respecting 
them as a sort of criterion of the probable truth or false- 
hood of assertions respecting the others. 

Of the Gibbons^ half a dozen species are found 
scattered over the Asiatic islands, Java, Sumatra, 
Borneo, and through Malacca, Siam, Arracan, and an 
uncertain extent of Hindostan, on the main land of 
Asia. The largest attain a few inches above three 
feet in height, from the crow^n to the heel, so that they 
are shorter than the other man-like Apes; while the 
slenderness of their bodies render their mass far 
smaller in proportion even to this diminished height. 

Dr. Salomon Miiller, an accomplished Dutch nat- 
uralist, who lived for many years in the Eastern Arch- 
ipelago, and to the results of whose personal experience 
I shall frequently have occasion to refer, states that 
the Gibbons are true mountaineers, loving the slopes and 
edges of the hills, though they rarely ascend beyond the 
limit of the fig-trees. All day long they haunt the tops 
of the tall trees; and though, towards evening, they 
descend in small troops to the open ground, no sooner 
do they spy a man than they dart up the hill-sides, and 
disappear in the darker valleys. 

All observers testify to the prodigious volume of voice 
possessed by these animals. According to the w^riter 
"whom I have just cited^ in one of them, the Siamangj 



42 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



^'the voice is grave and penetrating, resembling ^the 
sounds goek,goek,goek,goek,goek ha ha ha ha haaaaa, 




Fig. 8.— A Gibbon {H. pileatus) , after Wolf, 
and may easily be heard at a distance of half a 
league." "While the cry is being uttered, the great 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 43 

membranous bag under the throat which communicates 
with the organ of voice, the so-called " laryngeal sac/' 
becomes greatly distended, diminishing again when the 
creature relapses into silence. 

11. Duvaucel, likewise, affirms that the cry of the 
Siamang may be heard for miles — making the woods 
ring again. So Mr. Martin^ describes the cry of the 
agile Gibbon as '' overpowering and deafening " in a 
room, and " from its strength, well calculated for 
resounding through the vast forests." Mr. Water- 
house, an accomplished musician as well as zoologist, 
says, " The Gibbon's voice is certainly much more, 
powerful than that of any singer I ever heard." And 
yet it is to be recollected that this animal is not half 
the height of, and far less bulky in proportion than, a 
man. 

There is good testimony that various species of 
Gibbon readily take to the erect posture. Mr. George 
Bennett, f a very excellent observer, in describing the 
habits of a male Hylohates syndactylus which remained 
for some time in his possession, says : " He invariably 
walks in the erect posture when on a level surface ; and 
then the arms either hang down, enabling him to assist 
himself with his knuckles ; or what is more usual, he 
keeps his arms uplifted in nearly an erect position, with 
the hands pendent ready to seize a rope, and climb up on 
the approach of danger or on the obtrusion of strangers. 
He walks rather quick in the erect posture, but with a 
waddling gait, and is soon run down if, whilst pursued, 
he has no opportunity of escaping by climbing. . . . 
Wlien he walks in the erect posture he turns the leg and 
foot outwards, which occasions him to have a waddling 
gait and to seem bow-legged." 

* Man and Monties, p. 423. 

fWandf^rings in New South Wales, vol, ii, chap. viii. 1834, 



44 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Dr. Burroiigh states of another Gibbon, the Horlack 
or Hooluk: 

"They walk erect; and when placed on the floor, or in an 
open field, balance themselves very prettily, by raising their 
hands over their head and slightly bending the arm at the 
wrist and elbow, and then run tolerably fast, rocking from side 
to side; and, if urged to greater speed, they let fall their hands 
to the ground, and assist themselves forward, rather jumping 
than running, still keeping the body, however, nearly erect." 

Somewhat different evidence, however, is given by 
Dr. Winslow Lewis : ^ 

'^ Their only manner of walking was on their post- 
erior or inferior extremities, the others being raised 
upwards to preserve their eqnilibrium, as rope-dancers 
are assisted by long poles at fairs. Their progression 
was not by placing one foot before the other, but by sim- 
ultaneously using both, as in jumping." Dr. Salomon 
Mliller also states that the Gibbons progress along the 
ground by short series of tottering jumps, effected only 
by the hind limbs, the body being held altogether up- 
right. 

But Mr. Martin (I. c. p. 418), who also speaks 
from direct observation, says of the Gibbons generally: 

" Pre-eminently qualified for arboreal habits, and displaying 
among the branches amazing activity, the Gibbons are not so 
awKward or embarrassed on a level surface as might be im- 
agined. They walk erect, with a waddling or unsteady gait, 
but at a quick pace; the equilibrium of the body requiring to 
be kept up, either by touching the ground with the knuckles, 
first on one side then on the other, or by uplifting the arms so 
as to poise it. As with the Chimpanzee, the whole of the nar- 
row, long sole of the foot is placed upon the ground at once 
and raised at once, without any elasticity of step." 

After this mass of concurrent and independent 
testimony, it cannot reasonably be doubted that the 
Gibbons commonly and habitually assume the erect 
attitude. 

* ^^Qston Journal of Natural History, yoL L 1834. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 45 

But level ground is not the place where these animals 
can display their very remarkable and peculiar loco- 
motive powers^ and that prodigious activity which 
almost tempts one to rank them among flying, rather 
than among ordinary climbing mammals. 

Mr. Martin (I. c. p. 430) has given so excellent and 
graphic an account of the movements of a Hylohates 
agiUs, living in the Zoological Gardens, in 1840, that I 
will quote it in full : 

" It is almost impossible to convey in words an idea of the 
quickness and graceful address of her movements: they may 
indeed be termed aerial, as she seems merely to touch in her 
progress the branches among which she exhibits her evolu- 
tions. In these feats her hands and arms are the sole organs 
of locomotion; her body hanging as if suspended by a rope, 
sustained by one hand (the right for example), she launches 
herself, by an energetic movement, to a distant branch, which 
she catches with the left hand; but her hold is less than mo- 
mentary: the impulse for the next launch is acquired: the 
branch then aimed at is attained by the right hand again and 
quitted instantaneously, and so on in alternate succession. In 
this manner spaces of twelve and eighteen feet are cleared, 
with the greatest ease and uninterruptedly, for hours together, 
without the slightest appearance of fatigue being manifested; 
and it is evident that if more space could be allowed, distances 
very greatly exceeding eighteen feet would be as easily 
cleared; so that Duvaucel's assertion that he had seen these 
animals launch themselves from one branch to another, forty 
feet asunder, startling as it is, may be well credited. Some- 
times, on seizing a branch in her progress, she will throw her- 
self, by the power of one arm only, completely round it, mak- 
ing a revolution with such rapidity as almost to deceive the 
eye, and continue her progress with undiminished velocity. It 
is singular to observe how suddenly this Gibbon can stop, 
when the impetus given by the rapidity and distance of her 
swinging leaps would seem to require a gradual abatement of 
her movements. In the very midst of her flight a branch is 
seized, the body raised, and she is seen, as if by magic, quietly 
seated on it, grasping it with her feet. As suddenly she again 
throws herself into action. 

" The following facts will convey some notion of her dex- 
terity and quickness. A live bird was let loose in her apart- 
ment; she marked its flight, made a long swing to a distant 
branch, caught the bird with one hand in her passage, and 
attained the branch with her other hand; her aim, both at the 
bird and at the branch, being as successful as if one object 



4^ MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

only had engaged her attention. It may be added that she in- 
stantly bit off the head of the bird, picked its feathers, and 
then threw it down without attempting to eat it. 

" On another occasion this animal swung herself from a 
perch, across a passage at least twelve feet wide, against a 
window which it was thought would be immediately broken: 
but not so; to the surprise of all, she caught the narrow frame- 
^york between the panes with her hand, in an instant attained 
the proper impetus, and sprang back again to the cage she had 
left — a feat requiring not only great strength, but the nicest 
precision." 

The Gibbons appear to be naturally very gentle, but 
there is very good evidence that they will bite severely 
when irritated — a female Ilylobates ag'ilis having so 
severely lacerated one man with her long canines, that 
he died ; while she had injured others so much that, by 
way of precaution, these formidable teeth had been 
filed down ; but if threatened, she would still turn on her 
keeper. The Gibbons eat insects, but appear generally 
to avoid animal food. A Siamang, however, was seen 
by Mr. Bennett to seize and devour greedily a live 
lizard. They commonly drink by dipping their fingers 
in the liquid and then licking them. It is asserted that 
they sleep in a sitting posture. 

Duvaucel affirms that he has seen the females carry 
their young to the waterside and there wash their faces, 
in spite of resistance and cries. They are gentle and 
affectionate in captivity — full of tricks and pettishness, 
like spoiled children, and yet not devoid of a certain 
conscience, as an anecdote told by Mr. Bennett {I. c. p. 
156), will show. It would appear that his Gibbon had 
a peculiar inclination for disarranging things in the 
cabin. Among these articles, a piece of soap would 
especially attract his notice, and for the removal of 
this he had been once or twice scolded. '' One morn- 
ing," says Mr. Bennett, '^ I was waiting, the ape being 
present in the cabin, wlien casting my eyes towards him, 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 4Y 

I saw tlie little fellow taking the soap. I watcliecl him 
without his perceiving that I did so : and he occasionailj 
would cast a furtive glance towards the place where I 
sat. I pretended to write ; he, seeing me busily oc- 
cupied, took the soap, and moved away with it in his 
paw. When he had walked half the length of the cabin, 
I spoke quietly, without frightening him. The instant 
he found I saw him, he walked back again, and de- 
posited the soap nearly in the same place from whence 
he had taken it. There was certainly something more 
than instinct in that action : he evidently betrayed a 
consciousness of having done wrong both by his first and 
last actions — and what is reason if that is not an exer- 
cise of it ? " 

The most elaborate account of the natural history of 
the Okak^g-Utai^ extant, is that given in the " Yerhan- 
delingen over de ^N'atuurlijke Geschiedenis der Neder- 
landsche overzeesche Bezittingen (1839-'45)," by Dr. 
Salomon Mliller and Dr. Schlegel, and I shall base what 
I have to say upon this subject almost entirely on their 
statements, adding, here and there, particulars of inter- 
est from the vvritings of Brooke, Wallace, and others. 

The Orang-Utan would rarely seem to exceed four 
feet in height, but the body is very bulky, measuring 
two- thirds of the height in circumference.* 

* The largest Orang-Utan, cited by Temminck, measured, 
when standing upright, four feet; but he mentions having just 
received news of the capture of an Orang Ave feet three inches 
high. Schlegel and Mliller say that their largest old male 
measured, upright, 1.25 Netherlands " el "; and from the crown 
to the end of the toes, 1.5 el; the circumference of the body 
being about 1 el. The Jargest old female was 1.09 el high, 
when standing. The adult skeleton in the College of Sur- 
geon's Museum, if set upright, would stand 3 ft. 6-8 in. from 
crown to sole. Dr. Humphry gives 3 ft. 8 in. as the mean 
height of two Orangs. Of seventeen Orangs examined by Mr. 



48 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



The Orang-Utan is found onlj in Sumatra and 
Borneo, and is common in neither of these islands — in 
both of which it occurs always in low, flat plains, never 




Fig. 



-An adult male Orang-Utan, after Mliller and Schlegel. 



Wallace, the largest was 4 ft. 2 in. high, from the heel to the 
crown of the head. Mr. Spencer St. John, however, in his 
Life in the Forests of the Far East, tells us of an Orang of 
" 5 ft. 2 in., measuring fairly from the head to the heel," 15 
in. across the face, and 12 in. round the wrist. It does not 
appear, however, that Mr. St, John measured this Orang him- 
self. 



THE MAN-LIKE APEB. 49 

in the mountains. It loves the densest and most sombre 
of the forests, which extend from the sea-shore inland, 
and thus is found only in the eastern half of Sumatra, 
where alone such forests occur, though, occasionally, it 
strays over to the western side. 

On the other hand it is generally distributed through 
Borneo, except in the mountains, or where the popula- 
tion is dense. In favourable places, the hunter may, by 
good fortune, see three or four in a day. 

Except in the pairing time, the old males usually live 
by themselves. The old females, and the immature 
males, on the other hand, are often met with in twos 
and threes; and the former occasionally have young 
with them, though the pregnant females usually separ- 
ate themselves, and sometimes remain apart after they 
have given birth to their offspring. The young Orangs 
seem to remain unusually long under their mother's 
protection, probably in consequence of their slow 
growth. While climbing the mother always carries her 
young against her bosom, the young holding on by his 
mother's hair.^ At what time of life the Orang-Utan 
becomes capable of propagation, and how long the 
females go with young, is unknown, but it is probab e 
that they are not adult until they arrive at ten or fifteen 
years of age. A female which lived for five years at 
Batavia had not attained one-third the height of the 
wild females. It is probable that, after reaching adult 
years, they go on growing, though slowly, and that they 
live to forty or fifty years. The Dyaks tell of old 

* See Mr. Wallace's account of an infant " Orang-utan," in 
the Annals of Natural History for 1856. Mr. Wallace pro- 
vided his interesting charge with an artificial mother of buf- 
falo-skin, but the cheat was too successful. The infant's entire 
experience led it to associate teats with hair, and feeling the 
latter, it spent its existence in vain endeavours to discover 
the former. 

41 



80 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Orangs, which have not only lost all their teeth, but 
which find it so troublesome to climb, that they main- 
tain themselves on windfalls and juicy herbage. 

The Orang is sluggish, exhibiting none of that 
marvellous activity characteristic of the Gibbons. 
Hunger alone seems to stir him to exertion, and when it 
is stilled, he relapses into repose. When the animal sits, 
it curves its back and bows its head, so as to look straight 
down on the ground ; sometimes it holds on with its 
hands by a higher branch, sometimes lets them hang 
phlegmatically down by its side — and in these positions 
the Orang will remain, for hours together^ in the same 
spot, almost without stirring, and only now and then 
giving utterance to his deep, growling voice. By day 
he usually climbs from one tree-top to another, and only 
at night descends to the ground, and if then threatened 
with danger, he seeks refuge among the underwood. 
When not hunted, he remains a long time in the same 
locality, and sometimes stops for many days on the same 
tree — a firm place among its branches serving him for 
a bed. It is rare for the Orang to pass the night in the 
summit of a large tree, probably because it is too windy 
and cold there for him ; but, as soon as night draws on, 
he descends from the height and seeks out a fit bed in 
the lower and darker part, or in the leafy top of a small 
tree, among which he prefers Nibong Palms, Pandani, 
or one of those parasitic Orchids which give the primae- 
val forests of Borneo so characteristic and striking an 
appearance. But wherever he determines to sleep, there 
he prepares himself a sort of nest: little boughs and 
leaves are drawn together round the selected spot, and 
bent crosswise over one another ; while to make the bed 
soft, great leaves of Ferns, of Orchids, of Pandanus 
■fascicular is, Nipa fruticans, &c., are laid over them. 



^THE MAN-LIKE APES; gl 

I'hose wliicli Miiller saw, many of them being very 
fresh, were situated at a height of ten to twenty-five feet 
above the ground, and had a circumference, on the aver- 
age, of two or three feet. Some w^ere packed many 
inches thick with Pandamis leaves ; others were remark- 
able only for the cracked twigs, which, united in a com- 
mon centre, formed a regular platform. " The rude 
hut/' says Sir James Brooke, " which they are stated to 
build in the trees, would be more properly called a seat 
or nest, for it has no roof or cover of any sort. The 
facility w^ith which they form this nest is curious, and I 
had an opportunity of seeing a wounded female weave 
the branches together and seat herself, within a min- 
ute.'' 

According to the Dyaks the Orang rarely leaves his 
bed before the sun is well above the horizon and has 
dissipated the mists. He gets up about nine, and goes 
to bed again about five ; but sometimes not till late in the 
twilight. He lies sometimes on his back ; or, by way of 
change, turns on one side or the other, drawing his limbs 
up to his body, and resting his head on his hand. When 
the night is cold, windy, or rainy, he usually covers his 
body with a heap of Pandanus, Nipa, or Fern leaves,, 
like those of which his bed is made, and he is especially 
careful to wrap up his head in them. It is this habit of 
covering himself up which has probably led to the fable 
that the Orang builds huts in the trees. 

Although the Orang resides mostly amid the boughs 
of great trees, during the daytime, he is very rarely seen 
squatting on a thick branch, as other apes, and particu- 
larly the Gibbons do. The Orang, on the contrary, con- 
fines himself to the slender leafy branches, so that he is 
seen right at the top of the trees, a mode of life which is 
closely related to the constitution of his hinder limbsj 



§^ MAN'S PLACE IN.I^AfUilfi. 

aiid especially to that of his seat. For this is provided 
with no callosities, such as are possessed by many of the 
lower a]3es, and even by the Gibbons ; and those bones of 
the pelvis, which are termed the ischia, and which form 
the solid framework of the surface on which the body 
rests in the sitting posture, are not expanded like those 
of the apes which possess callosities, but are more like 
those of man. 

An Orang climbs so slowly and cautiously,"^ as, in 
this act, to resemble a man more than an ape, taking 
great care of his feet, so that injury of them seems to 
affect him far more than it does other apes. Unlike the 
Gibbons, whose forearms do the greater part of the 
work, as they swing from branch to branch, the Orang 
never makes even the smallest jump. In climbing, he 
moves alternately one hand and one foot, or, after hav- 
ing laid fast hold with the hands, he draws up both feet 
together. In passing, from one tree to another, he 
always seeks out a place where the twigs of both come 
close together, or interlace. Even when closely pursued, 
his circumspection is amazing: he shakes the branches to 
see if they will bear him, and then bending an over- 
hanging bough down by throwing his weight gradually 
along it, he makes a bridge from the tree he wishes to 
quit to the next.f 

On the ground the Orang always goes laboriously and 
shakily, on all fours. At starting he will run faster 
than a man, though he may soon be overtaken. The 
very long arms which, when he runs, are but little bent. 



* " They are the slowest and least active of all the monkey 
tribe, and their motions are surprisingly awkward and un- 
couth." — Sir James Brooke, in the Proceedings of the Zoolog- 
ical Society, 1841. 

t Mr. Wallace's account of the progression of the Orang 
almost exactly corresponds with this. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 53 

raise the body of tlie Orang remarkably^ so that he as- 
sumes much the posture of a very old man bent down 
by age, and making his way along by the help of a stick. 
In walking, the body is usually directed straight for- 
ward, unlike the other apes, which run more or les,s 
obliquely; except the Gibbons, who in these as in so 
many other respects, depart remarkably from their fel- 
lows. 

The Orang cannot put. its feet flat on the ground, but 
is supported upon their outer edges, the heel resting 
more on the ground, while the curved toes j^artly rest 
upon the ground by the upper side of their first joint, 
the two outermost toes of each foot completely resting 
on this surface. The hands are held in the opposite 
manner, their inner edges serving as the chief support. 
The fingers are then bent out in such a manner that 
their foremost joints, especialiy those of the two inner- 
most fingers, rest upon the ground by their upper sides, 
while the point of the free and straight thumb serves 
as an additional fulcrum. 

The Orang never stands on its hind legs, and all the 
pictures, representing it as so doing, are as false as the 
assertion that it defends itself with sticks, and the like. 

The long arms are of especial use, not only in climb- 
ing, but in the gathering of food from boughs to which 
the animal could not trust his weight. Figs, blossoms, 
and young leaves of various kinds, constitute the chief 
nutriment of the Orang; but strips of bamboo two or 
three feet long were found in the stomach of a male. 
They are not knowm to eat living animals. 

Although, when taken young, the Orang-Utan soon 
becomes domesticated, and indeed seems to court human 
society, it is naturally a very wild and shy animal, 
though apparently sluggish and melancholy. The Dyaks 



54 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

affirm, that when the old males are wounded wdth ar- 
rows only, they will occasionally leave the trees and rush 
raging upon their enemies, whose sole safety lies in 
instant flight, as they are sure to be killed if caught.* 

But, though possessed of immense strength, it is rare 
for the Orang to attempt to defend itself, especially 
when attacked with fire-arms. On such occasions he 
endeavours to hide himself, or to escape along the top- 
most branches of the trees, breaking off and throwing 
down the boughs as he goes. When wounded he betakes 
himself to the highest attainable point of the tree, and 



* Sir James Brooke, in a letter to Mr. Waterhoiise, pub- 
lislied in the proceedings of the Zoological Society for 1841, 
says: — "On the habits of the Orangs, as far as I have been able 
to observe them, I may remark that they are as dull and sloth- 
ful as can well be conceived, and on no occasion, when pur- 
suing them, did they move so fast as to preclude my keeping 
pace with them easily through a moderately clear forest; and 
even when obstructions below (such as wading up to the neck) 
allowed them to get away some distance, they were sure to stop 
and allow me to come up. I never observed the slightest at- 
tempt at defence, and the wood which sometimes rattled about 
our ears was broken by their weight, and not thrown, as some 
persons represent. If pushed to extremity, however, the Pap- 
pan could not be otherwise than formidable, and one unfortu- 
nate man, who, with a party, was trying to catch a large one 
alive, lost two of his fingers, besides being severely bitten on 
the face, whilst the animal finally beat off his pursuers and 
escaped." 

Mr. Wallace, on the other hand, affirms that he has several 
times observed them throwing down branches when pursued. 
" It is true he does not throw them at a person, but casts them 
down vertically; for it is evident that a bough cannot be 
thrown to any distance from the top of a lofty tree. In one 
case a fem.ale Mias, on a durian tree, kept up for at least ten 
minutes a continuous shower of branches and of the heavy, 
spined fruits, as large as 32-pounders, which most effectually 
kept us clear of the tree she was on. She could be seen brfeak- 
ing them off and throwing them down with every appearance 
of rage, uttering at intervals a loud pumping grunt, and evi- 
dently m.eaning mischief." — " On the Habits of the Orang- 
utan," Annals of Natural History. 1856. This statement, it 
will be observed, is quite in accordance with that contained in 
the letter of the Resident Palm quoted above (p. 23). 



Me MxVN-LlKfi APES. 5g 

emits a singular cry, consisting at first of liigii notes, 
which at length deepen into a low roar, not nnlike that 
of a panther. While giving out the high notes the 
Orang thrusts out his lips into a funnel shape ; but in 
uttering the low notes he holds his mouth wide open, 
and at the same time the great throat bag, or laryngeal 
sac, becomes distended. 

According to the Dyaks, the only animal the Orang 
measures his strength with is the crocodile, who occa- 
sionally seizes him on his visits to the water side. But 
they say that the Orang is more than a match for his 
enemy, and beats him to death, or rips up his throat by 
pulling the jaws asunder! 

Much of what has been here stated was probably de- 
rived by Dr. Mliller from the reports of his Dyak 
hunters; but a large male, four feet high, lived in cap- 
tivity, under his observation, for a month, and receives 
a very bad character. 

" He was a very wild beast," says Mliller, '' of prodi- 
gious strength, and false and wicked to the last degree. 
If any one approached he rose up slowly wdth a low 
growd, fixed his eyes in the direction in which he meant 
to make his attack, slowly passed his hand between the 
bars of his cage, and then extending his long arm, gave a 
sudden grip — usually at the face." He never tried to 
bite (though Orangs will bite one another), his great 
weapons of offence and defence being his hands. 

His intelligence was very great ; and Mliller remarks 
that though the faculties of the Orang have been esti- 
mated too highly, yet Cuvier, had he seen this specimen, 
would not have considered its intelligence to be only 
a little higher than that of the dog. 

His hearing was very acute, but the sense of vision 
seemed to be less perfect. The under lip was the great 



^Q MAN'S PLACE In NATURE. 

organ of touchy and played a very important part in 
drinking, being thrust out like a trough, so as either to 
catch the falling rain, or to receive the contents of the 
half cocoa-nut shell full of water with wdiich the Orang 
was supplied, and which, in drinking, he poured into 
the trough thus formed. 

^ In Borneo the Orang-Utan of the Malays goes by the 
name of '^ Mias " among the Dyaks, who distinguish 
several kinds as M\as Pappan, or Zimo, Mias Kassn, 
and Mias Ramhi. Whether these are distinct species, 
however, or whether they are mere races, and how far 
any of them are identical with the Sumatran Orang, as 
Mr. Wallace thinks the Mias Pappan to be, are problems 
which are at present undecided ; and the variability of 
these great apes is so extensive, that the settlement of 
the question is a matter of great difficulty. Of the form 
called '' Mias Pappan," Mr. Wallace " observes, 

" It is known by its large size, and by the lateral expansion 
of the face into fatty protuberances, or ridges, over the tem- 
poral muscles, which have been mis-termed callosities, as they 
are perfectly soft, smooth, and flexible. Five of this form, 
measured by me, varied only from 4 feet 1 inch to 4 feet 2 
inches in height, from the heel to the crown of the head, the 
girth of the body from 3 feet to 3 feet 71/2 inches, and the ex- 
tent of the outstretched arms from 7 feet 2 inches to 7 feet 
6 inches; the width of the face from 10 to 13 14 inches. The 
colour and length of the hair varied in different individuals, 
and in different parts of the sam.e individual; some possessed 
a rudimentary nail on the great toe, others none at all; but 
they otherwise present no external differences on which to 
establish even varieties of a species. 

" Yet, when we examine the crania of these individuals, we 
find remarkable differences of form, proportion, and dimension, 
no two being exactly alike. The slope of the profile, and the 
projection of the m.uzzle, together with the size of the cranium, 
offer differences as decided as those existing between the most 
strongly marked forms of the Caucasian and African crania 
in the human species. The orbits vary in width and height, 

* On the Orang-Utan, or Mias of Borneo, Annals of Natural 
History, 1856. 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 57 

the cranial ridge is either single or double, either much or little 
developed, and the zygomatic aperture varies considerably in 
size. This variation in the proportions of the crania enables us 
satisfactorily to explain the marked difference presented by the 
single-crested and double-crested skulls, which have been thought 
to prove the existence of two large species of Orang. The ex- 
ternal surface of the skull varies considerably in size, as do also 
the zygomatic aperture and the temporal muscle; but they bear 
no necessary relation to each other, a small muscle often exist- 
ing with a large cranial surface, and vice versa. Now, those 
skulls which have the largest and strongest jaws and the wid- 
est zygomatic aperture, have the muscles so large that they 
meet on the crown of the skull, and deposit the bony ridge 
which separates them, and which is the highest in that which 
has the smallest cranial surface. In those which combine a 
large surface with comparatively weak jaws, and small zygo- 
matic aperture, the muscles, on each side, do not extend to the 
crown, a space of from 1 to 2 inches remaining between them, 
and along their margins small ridges are formed. Intermedi- 
ate forms are found, in which the ridges meet only in the 
hinder part of the skull. The form and size of the ridges are 
therefore independent of age, being sometimes more strongly 
developed in the less aged animal. Professor Temminck states 
that the series of skulls in the Leyden Museum shows the same 
result." 

Mr. "Wallace observed two male adult Orangs (Mias 
Kassu of the Dvaks), however, so very different from 
any of these that he concludes them to be specifically 
distinct ; they were respectively 3 feet S-l inches and o 
feet 9-i inches high, and possessed no sign of the cheek 
excrescences, but otherwise resembled the larger kinds. 
The skull has no crest, but two bony ridges, If inches to 
2 inches apart, as in the Simla morlooi Professor Owen. 
The teeth, however, are immense, equalling or surpass- 
ing those of the other species. The females of both 
these kinds, according to Mr. Wallace, are devoid of 
excrescences, and resemble the smaller males, but are 
shorter by 1^ to 3 inches, and their canine teeth are 
comparatively small, subtruncated and dilated at the 
base, as in the so-called Simia morio, which is, in all 
probability, the skull of a female of the same species as 
the smaller males. Both males and females of this 



58 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

smaller species are distinguishable, according to Mr. 
Wallace, by the comparatively large size of the middle 
incisors of the upper jaw. 

So far as I am aware, no one has attempted to dispute 
the accuracy of the statements which I have just quoted 
regarding the habits of the two Asiatic man-like apes ; 
and if true, they must be admitted as evidence, that such 
an Ape — 

Istly, May readily move along the ground in the 
erect, or semi-erect, position, and without direct sup- 
port from its arms. 

2ndly, That it may possess an extremely loud voice, 
so loud as to be readily heard one or two miles. 

ordly, That it may be capable of great viciousness 
and violence when irritated : and this is especially true 
of adult males. 

4:thly, That it may build a nest to sleep in. 

Such being well established facts respecting the 
Asiatic Anthropoids, analogy alone might justify us in 
expecting the African species to offer similar peculiar- 
ities, separately or combined ; or, at any rate, would 
destroy the force of any attempted a priori argument 
against such direct testimony as might be adduced in 
favour of their existence. And, if the organization of 
any of the African Apes could be demonstrated to fit it 
better than either of its Asiatic allies for the erect posi- 
tion and for efficient attack, there would be still less 
reason for doubting its occasional adoption of the up- 
right attitude or of aggressive proceedings. 

From the time of Tyson and Tulpius downwards, the 
habits of the young Chimpanzee in a- state of captivity 
have been abundantly reported and commented upon. 
But trustworthy evidence as to the manners and customs 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 59 

of adult anthropoids of this species^ in their native 
woods, was almost wanting up to the time of the pub- 
lication of the paper by Dr. Savage, to which I have 
already referred; containing notes of the observations 
which he made, and of the information which he col- 
lected from sources which he considered trustworthy, 
while resident at Cape Palmas, at the north-western 
limit of the Bight of Benin. 

The adult Chimpanzees measured by Dr. Savage, 
never exceeded, though the males may almost attain, 
^ve feet in height. 

" When at rest the sitting posture is that generally assumed. 
They are sometimes seen standing and walking, but when 
thus detected, they immediately take to all fours, and flee from 
the presence of the observer. Such is their organisation that 
they cannot stand erect, but lean forward. Hence they are 
seen, when standing, with the hands clasped over the occiput, 
or the lumbar region, which would seem necessary to balance 
or ease of posture. 

" The toes of the adult are strongly flexed and turned in- 
wards, and cannot be perfectly straightened. In the attempt 
the skin gathers into thick folds on the back, showing that 
the full expansion of the foot, as is necessary in walking, is 
unnatural. The natural position is on all fours, the body ante- 
riorly resting upon the knuckles. These are greatly enlarged, 
with the skin protuberant and thickened like the sole of the 
foot. 

" They are expert climbers, as one would suppose from their 
organisation. In their gambols they swing from limb to limb 
to a great distance, and leap with astonishing agility. It is not 
unusual to see the ' old folks ' (in the language of an observer) 
sitting under a tree regaling themselves with fruit and friendly 
chat, while their ' children ' are leaping around them, and 
swinging f"om tree to tree with boisterous merriment. 

" As seen here, they cannot be called gregarious, seldom 
more than five, or ten at most, being found together. It has 
been said, on good authority, that they occasionally assemble 
in large numbers, in gambols. My informant asserts that he 
saw once not less than fifty so engaged; hootins", screaming, 
and drumming with sticks upon old logs, which is done in 
the latter case with equal facility by t-^e four extremities. 
They do not appear ever to act on the offensive, and seldom, 
if ever really, on the defensive. When about to be captured, 
thiey resist by throwing their arms about their opponent,^ and. 



60 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

attempting to draw him into contact with their teeth." (Sav- 
age, I. c. p. 384.) 

With respect to this last point Dr. Savage is very 
explicit in another place: 

" Biting is their principal art of defence. I have seen one 
man who had been thus severely wounded in the feet. 

" The strong development of the canine teeth in the adult 
would seem to indicate a carnivorous propensity; but in no 
state save that of domestication do they manifest it. At first 
they reject flesh, but easily acquire a fondness for it. The 
canines are early developed, and evidently designed to act the 
important part of weapons of defence. When in contact with 
man almost the first effort of the animal is — to hite. 

" They avoid the abodes of men, and build their habitations 
in trees. Their construction is more that of nests than huts, as 
they have been erroneously termed by some naturalists. They 
generally build not far above the ground. Branches or twigs 
are bent, or partly broken, and crossed, and the whole sup- 
ported by the body of a limb or a crotch. Sometimes a nest 
will be found near the end of a strong leafy hranch twenty or 
thirty feet from the ground. One I have lately seen that could 
not iDe less than forty feet, and more probably it was fifty. 
But this is an unusual height. 

"Their dwelling-place is not permanent, but changes in pursuit 
of food and solitude, according to the force of circumstances. 
We more often see them in elevated places; but this arises 
from the fact that the low grounds, being more favourable 
for the natives' rice-farms, are the oftener cleared, and hence 
are almost always wanting in suitable trees for their nests. 
. . . It is seldom that more than one or two nests are seen 
upon the same tree, or in the same neighbourhood: five have 
been found, but it was an unusual circumstance." . . . 

" They are very filthy in their habits. . . . It is a tradi- 
tion with the natives generally here, that they were once mem- 
bers of their own tribe: that for their depraved habits they 
were expelled from all human society, and, that through an 
obstinate indulgence of their vile propensities, they have de- 
generated into their present state and organisation. They are, 
however, eaten by them, and when cooked with the oil and 
pulp of the palm-nut considered a highly palatable morsel. 

" They exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence in their 
habits, and, on the part of the mother, much affection for their 
young. The second female described was upon a tree when 
first discovered, with her mate and two young ones (a male 
and a female). Her first impulse was to descend with great 
rapidity and make off into the thicket with her mate 
and female offspring. The young male remaining be- 
hind^ she soon returned to the rescue. She ascended and tools 



The man-like apes. 61 

him in her arms, at which moment she was shot, the ball 
passing through the fore-arm of the young one, on its way 
to the heart of the mother. . . , 

" In a recent case, the mother, when discovered, remained 
upon the tree with her offspring, watching intently the move- 
ments of the hunter. As he took aim, she motioned with her 
hand, precisely in the manner of a human being, to have him 
desist and go away. When the wound has not proved instantly 
fatal, they have been known to stop the flow of blood by press- 
ing with the hand upon the part, and when this did not suc- 
ceed, to apply leaves and grass. . . . When shot, they give 
a sudden screech, not unlike that of a human being in sud- 
den and acute distress." 

The ordinary voice of the Chimpanzee, however, is 
affirmed to be hoarse, guttural, and not very loud, some- 
what like " whoo-whoo." (I. c. p. 365.) 

The analogy of the Chimpanzee to the Orang, in its 
nest-building habit and in the mode of forming its nest, 
is exceedingly interesting ; while, on the other hand, the 
activity of this ape, and its tendency to bite, are parti- 
culars in which it rather resembles the Gibbons. In ex- 
tent of geographical range, again, the Chimpanzees — 
wdiich are found from Sierra Leone to Congo — remind 
one of the Gibbons, rather than of either of the other 
man-like apes; and it seems not unlikely that, as is the 
case with the Gibbons, there may be several species 
spread over the geographical area of the genus. 

The same excellent observer, from whom I have bor- 
rowed the preceding account of the habits of the adult 
Chimpanzee, published fifteen years ago,"^ an account of 
the GoKiLLA^ which has, in its most essential points, 
been confirmed by subsequent observers, and to which 
so very little has really been added, that in justice to 
Dr. Savage I give it almost in full. 

" It should be borne in mind that my account is based upon 
the statements of the aborigines of that region (the Gaboon). 

* Notice of the external characters and habits of Troglodytes 
Gorilla. Boston Journal of Natural History, 1847. 



62 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



In this connection, it may also be proper for me to remark, 
that having been a missionary resident for several years, 
studying, from habitual intercourse, the African mind and 
character, 1 felt myself prepared to discriminate and decide 
upon the probability of their statements. Besides, being fa- 




9m - 







^i-1- 



^V5;J- 



-i*t2j 



Fig. 10.— The Gorilla, after Wolf. 

miliar with the history and habits of its interesting congener 
(Trog. niger, Geoff.), I was able to separate their accounts 
of the two animals which, having the same locality and a simi- 
larity of habit, are confounded in the minds of the mass, es- 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 63 

pecially as but few — siicli as traders to the interior and hunts- 
men — have ever seen the animal in question. 

" The tribe from which our knowledge of the animal is de- 
rived, and whose territory forms its habitat, is the Wlpongioe, 
occupying both banks of the River Gaboon, from its mouth to 
some fifty or sixty miles upward. . . . 

" If the word ' Pongo ' be of African origin, it is probably a 
corruption of the word Mpongive; the name of the tribe on the 
banks of the Gaboon, and hence applied to the region they in- 
habit. Their local name for the Chimpanzee is Enche-eko, as 
near as it can be Anglicised, from which the common term 
' Jocko ' probably comes. The Mpongwe appellation for its 
new congener is Enge-ena, prolonging the sound of the first 
vowel, and slightly sounding the second. 

" The habitat of the Engc-ena is the interior of lower Guinea, 
whilst that of the Encliv-eko is nearer the seaboard. 

" Its height is about five feet; it is disproportionately broad 
across the shoulders, thickly covered with coarse black hair, 
which is said to be similar in its arrangement to that of the 
Enche-eko ; with age it becomes gray, which fact has given rise 
to the report that both animals are seen of different colours. 

" Head. — The prominent features of the head are, the great 
width and elongation of the face, the depth of the molar region, 
the branches of the lower jaw being very deep and extending 
far backward, and the comparative smallness of the cranial 
portion; the eyes are very large and said to be like those of 
the Enche-eko, a bright hazel; nose broad and flat, slightly 
elevated towards the root; the muzzle broad, and prominent 
lips and chin, with scattered gray hairs; the under lip highly 
mobile, and capable of great elongation when the animal is 
enraged, then hanging over the chin; skin of the face and 
ears naked, and of a dark brov/n, approaching to black. 

The most remarkable feature of the head is a high ridge, 
or crest of hair, in the course of the sagittal suture, which 
meets posteriorly with a transverse ridge of the same, but 
less prominent, running round from the back of one ear to the 
other. The animal has the power of moving the scalp freely 
forward and back, and when enraged is said to contract it 
strongly over the brow, thus bringing down the hairy ridge 
and pointing the hair forward, so as to present a,n indescrib- 
ably ferocious aspect. 

"Neck short, thick, and hairy; chest and shoulders very 
broad, said to be fully double the size of the Enche-ekos; arms 
very long, reaching some way below the knee — the fore-arm 
much the shortest; hands very large, the thumbs much larger 
than the fingers. . . . 

" The gait is shuffling; the motion of the body, which is 
never upright as in man, but bent forward, is somewhat roll- 
ing, or from side to side. The arms being longer than the 
Chimpanzee, it does not stoop as much in walking; like that 
animal, it makes progression by thrusting its arms forvv^ard, 



64: 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



resting the hands on the ground, and then giving the body a 
half jumping, half swinging motion between them. In this 
act it is said not to flex the fingers as does the Chimpanzee, 
resting on its knuckles, but to extend them, making a fulcrum 
of the hand. When it assumes the walking posture, to which 
it is said to be much inclined, it balances its huge body by 
flexing its arms upward. 

" They live in bands, but are not so numerous as the Chim- 
panzees; the females generally exceed the other sex in num- 
ber. My informants all agree in the assertion that but one 
adult male is seen in a band; that when the young males grow 
up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by 
killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the 
head of the community." 




Fig. 11.— Gorilla walking (after Wolf). 

Dr. Savage repudiates the stories about the Gorillas 
carrying off women and vanquishing elephants and then 
adds — 



" Their dwellings, if they may be so called, are similar to 
those of the Chimpanzee, consisting simply of a few sticks 
and leafy branches, supported by the crotches and limbs of 
trees: they afford no shelter, and are occupied only at night. 

" They are exceedingly ferocious, and always offensive in 
their habits, never running from man, as does the Chimpanzee. , 
They are objects of terror to the natives, and are never en- 
countered by them except on the defensive. The few that 
have been captured were killed by elephant hunters and na- 
tive traders, as they came suddenly upon them while passing 
tlirough the forests. 

" It is said that when the male is first seen he gives a ter- 
rl^c yell, that resounds far and wide th?rpugh the forests, 

K 



We MAN-LtKE APE^; ^5 

something like kh — ah! kh — ah! prolonged and shrill. His 
enormous jaws are widely opened at each expiration, his under 
lip hangs over the chin, and the hairy ridge and scalp are 
contracted upon the brow, presenting an aspect of indescrib- 
able ferocity. 

" The females and young, at the first cry, quickly disappear. 
He then approaches the enemy in great fury, pouring out his 
horrid cries in quick succession. The hunter awaits his ap- 
proach with his gun extended; if his aim is not sure, he per- 
mits the animal to grasp the barrel, and as he carries it to his 
mouth (which is his habit) he fires. Should the gun fail to 
go off, the barrel (that of the ordinary musket, which is thin) 
is crushed between his teeth, and the encounter soon proves 
fatal to the hunter. 

" In the wild state, their habits are in general like those of 
the Troglodytes niger, building their nests loosely in trees, 
living on similar fruits, and changing their place of resort 
from force of circumstances." 

Dr. Savage's observations Avere confirmed and sup- 
plemented by those of ]\Ir. Ford, Avho communicated an 
interesting paper on the Gorilla to the Philadelphian 
Academy of Sciences, in 1852. With respect to the 
geographical distribution of this greatest of all the man- 
like Apes, Mr. Ford remarks : 

" This animal inhabits the range of mountains that trav- 
erse the interior of Guinea, from the Cameroon in the north, 
to Angola in the south, and about 100 miles inland, and called 
by the geographers Crystal Mountains. The limit to which 
this animal extends, either north or south, I am unable to de- 
fine. But that limit is doubtless some distance north of this 
river [Gaboon]. I was able to certify myself of this fact in 
a late excursion to the head-waters of the Mooney (Danger) 
River, which comes into the sea some sixty miles from this 
place. I was informed (credibly, I think) that they were 
numerous among the mountains in which that river rises, and 
far north of that. 

" In the south, this species extends to the Congo River, as 
I am told by native traders who have visited the coast between 
the Gaboon and that river. Beyond that, I am not informed. 
This animal is only found at a distance from the coast in most 
cases, and, according to my best information, approaches it 
nowhere so nearly as on the south side of this river, where 
they have been found within ten miles of the sea. This, how- 
ever, is only of late occurrence. I am informed by some of 
the oldest Mpongwe men that formerly he was only found on 
the sources of the river, but that at present he may be found 



eO MAN'S PLACE IN NATtJRE. 

within half-a-day's walk of its mouth. Formerly he inhabited 
the mountainous ridge where Bushmen alone inhabited, but 
now he boldly approaches the Mpongwe plantations. This is 
doubtless the reason of the scarcity of information in years 
past, as the opportunities for receiving a knowledge of the 
animal have not been wanting; traders having for one hun- 
dred years frequented this river, and specimens, such as have 
been Ijrought here within a year, could not have been exhibited 
without having attracted the attention of the most stupid." 

One specimen Mr. Ford examined weighed 170 Ibs.;^ 
without the thoracic, or pelvic^ viscera, and measured 
four feet four inches round the chest. This writer 
describes so minutely and graphically the onslaught of- 
the Gorilla — though he does not for a moment pretend 
to have witnessed the scene — that I am tempted to give 
this part of his paper in full, for comparison with other 
narratives : 



** He always rises to his feet when making an attack, though 
he approaches his antagonist in a stooping posture. 

" Though he never lies in wait, yet, when he hears, sees or 
scents a man, he immediately utters his characteristic cry, 
prepares for an attack and always acts on the offensive. The 
cry he utters resembles a grunt more than a growl, and is 
similar to the cry of the Chimpanzee, when irritated, but vastly 
louder. It is said to be audible at a great distance. His prepa- 
ration consists in attending the fem-ales and young ones, by 
whom he is usually accompanied, to a little distance. He, how- 
ever, soon returns with his crest erect and projecting forward, 
his nostrils dilated, and his under-lip thrown down, at the 
same time uttering his characteristic yell, designed, it would 
seem, to terrify his antagonist. Instantly, unless he is dis- 
abled by a well-directed shot, he makes an onset, and striking 
his antagonist with the palm of his hands, or seizing him with 
a grasp from which there is no escape, he dashes him upon 
the ground, and lacerates him with his tusks. 

" He is said to seize a maisket, and instantly crush the barrel 

between his teeth This animal's savage nature 

is very well shown by the implacable desperation of a young 
one that was brought here. It was taken very young, and 
kept four months, and many means were used to tame it; but 
it was incorrigible, so that it bit me an hour before it died." 

Mr. Ford discredits the house-building and elephant- 



THE MAN-LIKE APES. 67 

driving stories, and savs that no well-informed natives 
believe them. They are tales told to children. 

I might quote other testimony to a similar effect, but, 
as it appears to me, less carefully weighed and sifted, 
from the letters of MM. Franquet and Gautier Laboul- 
lay, appended to the memoir of M. I. Gr. St. Hilaire, 
which I have already cited. 

Bearing in mind what is known regarding the Orang 
and the Gibbon, the statements of Dr. Savage and Mr. 
Ford do not appear to me to be justly open to criticism 
on a priori grounds. The Gibbons, as we have seen, 
readily assume the erect posture, but the Gorilla is far 
better fitted by its organization for that attitude than 
are the Gibbons : if the laryngeal pouches of the Gib- 
bons, as is very likely, are important in giving volume to 
a voice which can be heard for half a league, the Gorixla, 
which has similar sacs, more largely developed, and 
whose bulk is fivefold that of a Gibbon, may well be 
audible for twice that distance. If the Orang fights 
with its hands, the Gibbons and Chimpanzees with the 
teeth, the Gorilla may, probably enough, do either or 
both ; nor is there anything to be said against either 
Chimpanzee or Gorilla building a nest, when it is 
proved that the Orang-Ftan habitually performs that 
feat. 

With all this evidence, now ten to fifteen years old, 
before the world, it is not a little surprising that the 
assertions of a recent traveller, who, so far as the Gorilla 
is concerned, really does very little more than repeat, on 
his own authority, the statements of Savage and of Ford, 
should have met with so much and such bitter opposi- 
tion. If subtraction be made of what was known before, 
the sum and substance of what M. Du Chaillu has af- 
firmed as a matter of his own observation respecting the 



(TS MAi^'S PLACE iN NATUKE. 

Gorilla, is, tliat, in advancing to the attack, the great 
brute beats bis chest with his fists. I confess I see noth- 
ing very improbable, or very much worth disputing 
iaboutj in this statement; 

With respect to the other man-like Apes of Africa, M» 
Du Chaillu tells us absolutely nothing, of his own 
knowledge, regarding the common Chimpanzee ; but he 
informs us of a bald-headed species or variety, the 
nscMego mhouve, which builds itself a shelter, and of 
another rare kind with a comparatively small face, large 
facial angle, and peculiar note, resembling " Kooloo." 

As the Orang shelters itself with a rough coverlet of 
leaves, and the common Chimpanzee, according to that 
eminently trustworthy observer Dr. Savage, makes a 
sound like " Whoo-whoo," — the grounds of the sum- 
mary repudiation with which M. Du Chaillu's state- 
ments on these matters have been met are not obvious. 

If I have abstained from quoting M. Du Chaillu's 
work, then, it is not because I discern any inherent im- 
probability in his assertions respecting the man-like 
Apes ; nor from any wish to throw suspicion on his vera- 
city ; but because, in my opinion, so long as his narra- 
tive remains in its present state of unexplained and 
apparently inexplicable confusion, it has no claim to 
original authority respecting any subject whatsoever. 

It may be truth, but it is not evidence. 



AFRICAN CANNIBALISM, 69 



African Cannibalism in the Sixteenth Century. 

In turning over Pigafetta's version of the narrative of Lopez, 
which I have quoted above, I came upon so curious and unex- 
pected an anticipation, by some two centuries and a half, of 
one of the most startling parts of M. Du Chaillu's narrative, 
that I cannot refrain from drawing attention to it in a not?, 
although I must confess that the subject is not strictly relevant 
to the matter in hand. 

In the fifth chapter of the first book of the " Descriptio," 
" Concerning the northern part of the Kingdom of Congo and 
its boundaries," is mentioned a people whose king is 
called " Mamloango," and who live under the equator, 
and as far westward as Cape Lopez. This appears to 
be the country now inhabited by the Ogobai and Bakalai ac- 
cording to M, Du Chaillu. — " Beyond these dwell another peo- 
ple called ' Anziques,' of incredible ferocity, for they eat one 
another, sparing neither friends nor relations." 

These people are armed with small bows bound tightly round 
with snake skins, and strung with a reed or rush. Their ar- 
rows, short and slender, but made of hard wood, are shot with 
great rapidity. They have iron axes, the handles of which 
are bound round with snake skins," and swords with scabbards 
of the same material; for defensive armour they employ ele- 
phant hides. They cut their skins when young, so as to pro- 
duce scars. "Their butchers' shops are filled with human flesh 
instead of that of oxen or sheep. For they eat the enemies 
whom they take in battle. They fatten, slay and devour their 
slaves also, unless they think they shall get a good price for 
them; and, moreover, sometimes for weariness of life or de- 
sire of glory (for they think it a great thing and the sign of a 
generous soul to despise life), or for love of their rulers, offer 
themselves up for food." 

" There are indeed many cannibals, as in the Eastern Indies 
and in Brazil and elsewhere, but none such as these, since the 
others only eat their enemies, but these their ov/n blood rela- 
tions." 

The careful illustrators of Pigafetta have done their best 
to enable the reader to realize this account of the " Anziques," 
and the unexampled butcher's shop represented in Fig. 12, is 
a facsimile of part of their Plate XII. 

M. Du Chaillu's account of the Fans accords most singularly 
with what Lopez here narrates of the Anziques. He speaks 
of their small cross bows and little arrows, of their axes and 
knives, " ingeniously sheathed in snake skins." " They tattoo 



70 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



themselves more than any other tribes I have met north of the 
equator." And all the world knows what M. Du Chaillu says 
of their cannibalism — " Presently we passed a woman who 
solved all doubt. She bore with her a piece of the thigh of a 
human body, just as we should go to market and carry thence 
a roast or steak." M. Du Chaillu's artist cannot generally be 
accused of any want of courage in embodying the statements 
of his author, and it is to be regretted that, with so good an 
excuse, he has not furnished us v/ith a fitting companion to the 
sketch of the brothers De Bry. 








^^j^^^.^'^i ~^^^ 



£l«^^ 



Fig. 12.— Butcher's Shop of the Anziques Anno, 1598, 



AFRICAN CANNIBALISM. 



Tl 




72 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



II. 

ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE 
LOWER ANIMALS. 

Miiltis videri poterit, majorem esse differentiam Simiae et Hom- 
inis, qiiam diei et noctis; verum tamen hi, comparatione 
instituta inter summos Europa? Heroes et Hottentottes ad 
Caput bonse spei degentes, difRcillime sibi persuadebunt, 
has eosdem habere natales; vel si virginem nobilem auli- 
cam maxime comtam et hiimanissimam, conferre vellent 
cum homine sylvestri et sibi relicto, vix augurari possent, 
hunc et illam ejusdem esse speciei. — Linnwi Amwnitates 
Acad. " Anthropomorpha." 

The question of questions for mankind — tlie problem 
which underlies all others, and is more deeply inter- 
esting than any other — is the ascertainment of the place 
which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the 
universe of things. Whence our race has come; what 
are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's 
power over us ; to what goal w^e are tending ; are the 
problems which present themselves anew and with 
undiminished interest to every man born into the world. 
Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers 
which beset the seeker after original answers to these 
riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to 
smother the investigating spirit under the feather-bed of 
respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, 
one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive 
genius, which can only build on a secure foundation, or 
cursed wdth the spirit of mere scepticism, are unable to 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 73 

follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of tlieir 
forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of 
thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of 
their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which 
asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism 
which denies the existence of any orderly progress and 
governance of things : the men of genius propound solu- 
tions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philo- 
sophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests 
more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an 
epoch. 

Each such answer to the great question, invariably 
asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by 
himself, to be complete and final, remains in high au- 
thority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may 
be for twenty: but, as invariably. Time proves each 
reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth — 
tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by 
whom it w^as accepted, and wholly intolerable when 
tested by the larger knowledge of their successors. 

In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between 
the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar 
into the butterfly ; but the comparison may be more just 
as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the 
mental progress of the race. History shows that the 
human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, 
periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, 
and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, 
as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its 
too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but tem- 
porary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be 
terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained, and 
of such there have been many. 

Since the revival of learning, whereby the Western 



Y4 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

races of Europe were enabled to enter upon that progress 
towards true knowledge, which was commenced by the 
phi-osophers of Greece, but was almost arrested in sub- 
sequent long ages of intellectual stagnation, or, at most, 
gyration, the human larva has been feeding vigorously, 
and moulting in proportion. A skin of some dimension 
was cast in the IGth century, and another towards the 
end of the 18th, while, within the last fifty years, the 
extraordinary growth of every department of physical 
science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious 
and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems 
imminent. But this is a process not unusually accom-^ 
panied by many throes and some sickness and debility, 
or, it may be, by graver disturbances ; so that every good 
citizen must feel bound to facilitate the process, and 
even if he have nothing but a scalpel to work withal, to 
ease the cracking integument to the best of his ability. 

In this duty lies my excuse for the publication of 
these essays. For it will be admitted that some knowl- 
edge of man's position in the animate world is an indis- 
pensable preliminary to the proper understanding of his 
relations to the universe; and this again resolves itself, 
in the long run, into an inquiry into the nature and the 
closeness of the ties which connect him with those singu- 
lar creatures whose history"^ has been sketched in the 
preceding pages. 

The importance of such an inquiry is indeed intui- 
tively manifest. Brought face to face with these 
blurred copies of himself, the least thoughtful of men is ^ 
conscious of a certain shock, due perhaps, not so much 
to disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting 

* It will be understood that, in the preceding Essay, I have 
selected for notice from the vast mas-s of papers which have 
been written upon the man-like Apes, only those which seem 
to me to be of special moment. 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 75 

caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and pro- 
found mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly- 
rooted prejudices regarding his own position in nature, 
and his relations to the under-world of life ; while that 
which remains a dim suspicion for the unthinking, 
becomes a vast argument fraught with the deepest con- 
sequences, for all who are acquainted with the recent 
progress of the anatomical and physiological sciences. 

I now propose briefly to unfold that argument, and to 
set forth, in a form intelligible to those who possess no 
special acquaintance with anatomical science, the chief 
facts upon which all conclusions respecting the nature 
and the extent of the bonds which connect man with the 
brute world must be based : I shad then indicate the 
one immediate conclusion which, in my judgment, is 
justified by those facts, and I shall finally discuss the 
bearing of that conclusion upon the hypotheses which 
have been entertained respecting the Origin of Man. 

The facts to which I would first direct the reader's 
attention, though ignored by many of the professed in- 
structors of the public mind, are easy of demonstration 
and are universally agreed to by men of science ; while 
their significance is so great, that whoso has duly pon- 
dered over them will, I think, find little to startle him in 
the other revelations of Biology. I refer to those facts 
which have been made known by the study of Develop- 
ment. 

It is a truth of very wide, if not of universal, applica- 
tion, that every living creature commences its existence 
under a form different from, and simpler than, that 
which it eventually attains. 

The oak is a more complex thing than the little rudi- 
mentary plant contained in the acorn ; the caterpillar is 



T6 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



more complex than the egg ; the butterfly than the cater- 
pillar; and each of these beings, in passing from its 
rudimentary to its perfect condition, runs through a 
series of changes, the sum of which is called its Develop- 
ment. In the higher anima's these changes are ex- 
tremely complicated ; but, within the last half century, 
the labours of such men as Von Baer, Kathke, Reichert, 
Bischoff, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled 
them, so that the successive stages of development which 
are exhibited by a Dog, for example, are now as well 




Fig. 13. — A. Egg of the Dog, with the vitelline membrane 
burst, so as to give exit to the yelk, the germinal vesicle (a), 
and its included spot {h). B. C. D. E. F. Successive changes 
of the yelk indicated in the text. After Bischoff. 

known to the embryologist as are the steps of the meta- 
morphosis of the silk-worm moth to the school-boy. It 
will be useful to consider with attention the nature and 
the order of the stages of canine development, as an 
example of the process in the higher animals generahy. 
The dog, like all animals, save the very lowest (and 
further inquiries may not improbably remove the appar- 
ent exception), commences its existence as an egg: as a 
\)odj which is, in every sense, as much an egg as that of 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. ^f 

a hen, but is devoid of that accumulation of nutritive 
matter which confers upon the bird's egg its exceptional 
size and domestic utility; and wants the shelly which 
would not only be useless to an animal incubated within 
the body of its parent, but would cut it off from access to 
the source of that nutriment which the young creature 
requires, but which the minute egg of the mammal does 
not contain within itself. 

The Dog's egg is, in fact, a little spheroidal bag (Fig. 
13), formed of a delicate transparent membrane called 
the vitelline merribrane^ and about yxo-th to -xiuth of an 
inch in diameter. It contains a mass of viscid nutritive 
matter — the yeJh — within which is enclosed a second 
much more delicate spheroidal bag, called the germinal 
vesicle (a). In this, lastly, lies a more solid rounded 
body, termed the germinal spot (h). 

The eggy or Ovum, is originally formed within a 
gland, from which, in due season, it becomes detached, 
and passes into the living chamber fitted for its protec- 
tion and maintenance during the protracted process of 
gestation. Here, when subjected to the required condi- 
tions, this minute and apparently insignificant particle 
of living matter becomes animated by a new and myster- 
ious activity. The germinal vesicle and spot cease to be 
discernible (their precise fate being one of the yet 
unsolved problems of embryology), but the yelk becomes 
circumferentially indented, as if an invisible knife had 
been drawn round it, and thus ap|)ears divided into two 
hemispheres (Fig. 13, C). 

By the repetition of this process in various planes, 
these hemispheres become subdivided, so that four seg- 
ments are produced (I)) ; and these, in like manner, 
divide and subdivide again, until the whole yelk is con- 
verted into a mass of granules, each of which consists of 



?g MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

a minute spheroid of yelk-substance, inclosing a central 
jjarticle, the so-called nucleus (F). Nature, by this 
process, has attained much the same result as that which 
a human artificer arrives at by his operations in a brick- 
field. She takes the rough plastic material of the yelk 
and breaks it up into well-shaped tolerably even-sized 
masses — handy for building up into any part of the liv- 
ing edifice. 

ISText, the mass of organic bricks, or cells as they are 
technically called, thus formed, acquires an orderly 
arrangement, becoming converted into a hollow spheroid 
with double walls. Then, upon (jne side of this spheroid, 
appears a thickening, and, by and bye, in the centre of 
the area of thickening, a straight shallow groove (Fig. 
14, A) marks the central line of the edifice which is to 
be raised, or, in other words, indicates the position of the 
middle line of the body of the future dog. The sub- 
stance bounding the groove on each side next rises up 
into a fold, the rudiment of the side wall of that long 
cavity, which will eventually lodge the spinal marrow 
and the brain ; and in the floor of this chamber appears 
a solid cellular cord, the so-calleJ notochord. One end 
of the enclosed cavity dilates to form the head (Fig. 14, 
B), the other remains narrow, and eventually becomes 
the tail ; the side walls of the body are fashioned out of 
the downward continuation of the walls of the groove ; 
and from them, by and bye, grow out little buds which, 
by degrees, assume the shape of limbs. Watching the 
fashioning process stage by stage, one is forcibly re-^ 
minded of the modeller in clay. Every part, every 
organ, is at first, as it were pinched up rudely, and 
sketched out in the rough ; then shaped more accurately ; 
and only, at last, receives the touches which stamp its 
final character. 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 



79 



Thus, at length, the young pu^opj assumes such a form 
as is shown in Fig. 14, C. In this condition it has a 
disproportionately large head, as dissimilar to that of a 
dog as the bud-like limbs are unlike his legs. 

The remains of the yelk, which have not yet been 
applied to the nutrition and growth of the young animal, 
are contained in a sac attached to the rudimentary intes- 
tine, and termed the yelk sac, or umhilical vesicle. Two 
membranous bags, intended to subserve respectively the 




Fig. 14. — A. Earliest rudiment of the Dog. B. Rudiment fur- 
ther advanced, showing the foundations of the head, tail, and 
vertebral column. C. The very young puppy, with attached 
ends of the yelk-sac and allantois, and invested in the amnion. 

protection and nutrition of the young creature, have 
been developed from the skin and from the under and 
hinder surface of the body; the former, the so-called 
amnion, is a sac filled with fluid, which invests the whole 
body of the embryo, and plays the part of a sort of water- 
bed for it ; the other, termed the allantois, grows out, 
loaded with Kood-ves-sels, from the ventral region, and 
eventually applying itself to the walls of the cavity, in 
which the developing organism is contained, enables 



80 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

these vessels to become the channel by which the stream 
of nutriment, required to supply the wants of the off- 
spring, is furnished to it by the parent. 

The structure Avhich is developed by the interlacement 
of the vessels of the offspring with those of the parent, 
and by means of which the former is enabled to receive 
nourishment and to get rid of effete matters, is termed 
the Placenta. 

It would be tedious, and it is unnecessary for my 
present purpose, to trace the process of development 
further ; suffice it to say, that, by a long and gradual 
series of changes the rudiment here depicted and 
described, becomes a puppy, is born, and then, by still 
slower and less perceptible steps, passes into the adult 
Dog. 

There is not much apparent resemblance between a 
barn-door Fowl and the Dog who protects the farm- 
yard. JsTevertheless the student of development finds, 
not only that the chick commences its existence as an 
egg, primarily identical in ad essential respects, with 
that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes 
division — that the primitive groove arises, and that 
the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by pre- 
cisely similar methods, into a young chick, which, at one 
stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that 
ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two. 

The history of the development of any other verte- 
brate animal. Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the 
same story. There is ahvays, to begin with, an egg 
having the same essential structure as that of the Dog : 
— the yelk of that Qgg always undergoes division, or 
segynentation as it is often called : the ultimate products 
of that segmentation constitute the building materials 



Man and the lower animals. 81 

for the body of the young animal ; and this is bnilt up 
round a primitive groove, in the floor of which a noto- 
chord is developed. Furthermore, there is a period in 
which the young of all these animals resemble one an- 
other, not merely in outward form, but in all essentials 
of structure, so closely, that the differences between them 
are inconsiderable, while, in their subsequent course 
they diverge more and more widely from one another. 
And it is a general law, that, the more closely any ani- 
mals resemble one another in adult structure, the longer 
and the more intimately do their embryos resemble one 
another : so that, for example, the embryos of a Snake 
and of a Lizard remain like one another longer than do 
those of a Snake and of a Bird ; and the embryo of a Dog 
and of a Cat remain like one another for a far longer 
period than do those of a Dog and a Bird ; or of a Dog 
and an Opossum; or even than those of a Dog and a 
Monkey. 

Thus the study of development affords a clear test of 
closeness of structural affinity, and one turns with im- 
patience to inquire Avhat results are yielded by the study 
of the development of Man. Is he something apart? 
Does he originate in a totally different way from Dog, 
Bird, Frog, and Fish, thus justifying those who assert 
him to have no place in nature and no real affinity with 
the lower world of animal life ? Or does he originate in 
a similar germ, pass through the same slow and gradu- 
ally progressive modifications, depend on the same con- 
trivances for protection and nutrition, and finally enter 
the world by the help of the same mechanism ? The 
reply is not doubtful for a moment, and has not been 
doubtful any time these thirty years. Without question, 
the mode of origin and the early stages of the develop- 
ment of man are identical with those of the animals im- 
6 



82 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATtJRE. 



mediately below him in the scale : — without a doubt, iri 
these respects, he is far nearer the Apes, than the Apes 
are to the Dog. 

The Human ovum is about y^-g^th of an inch in dia- 
meter, and might be described in the same terms as that 
of the Dog, so that I need only refer to the figure illus- 
trative (15 A) of its structure. It leaves the organ in 
which it is formed in a similar fashion and enters the 
organic chamber prepared for its reception in the same 
way, the conditions of its development being in all 




Fig. 15. — A. Human ovum (after Kolliker). a. germinal 
vesicle. &. germinal spot. B. A very early condition of Man, 
with yelk-sac, allantois and amnion (original). C. A more ad- 
vanced stage (after Kolliker), compare Pig. 14, C. 

respects the same. It has not yet been possible (and 
only by some rare chance can it ever be possible) to 
study the human ovum in so early a developmental stage 
as that of yelk division, but there is every reason to con- 
clude that the changes it undergoes are identical witji 
those exhibited by the ova of other vertebrated animals ; 
for the formative materials of which the rudimentary 
human body is composed, in the earliest conditions in 
which it has been observed, are the same as those of other 
animals. Some of these earliest stages are figured above 



Man and the lower animals. gS 

and, as will be seen, they are strictly comparable to the 
very early states of the Dog; the marvellous correspon- 
dence between the two which is kept up, even for some 
time, as development advances, becoming apparent by 
the simple comparison of the figures with those on page 
86. 

Indeed, it is very long before the body of the young 
human being can be readily discriminated from that of 
the young puppy ; but, at a tolerably early period, the 
two become distinguishable by the different form of 
their adjuncts, the yelk-sac and the allantois. The 
former, in the Dog, becomes long and spindle-shaped, 
while in Man it remains spherical: the latter, in the 
Dog, attains an extremely large size, and the vascular 
processes which are developed from it and eventually 
give rise to the formation of the placenta (taking root, 
as it were, in the parental organism, so as to draw nour- 
ishment therefrom, as the root of a tree extracts it from 
the soil) are arranged in an encircling zone, while in 
Man, the allantois remains comparatively small, and 
its vascular rootlets are eventually restricted to one disk- 
like spot. Hence, while the placenta of the Dog is like 
a girdle, that of Man has the cake-like form, indicated 
by the name of the organ. 

But, exactly in those respects in which the developing 
Man differs from the Dog, he resembles the ape, which, 
like man, has a spheroidal ye'.k-sac and a discoidal, some- 
times partially lobed, placenta. So that it is only quite 
in the later stages of development that the young human 
being presents marked differences from the young ape, 
while the latter departs as much from the dog in its 
development, as the man does. 

Startling as the last assertion may appear to be, it is 
demonstrably true, and it alone appears to me sufiicient 



§4 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

to place beyond all doubt tlie structural unity of mall 
with the rest of the animal world, and more particularly 
and closely with the apes. 

Thus, identical in the physical processes by which he 
originates — identical in the early stages of his formation 
— identical in the mode of his nutrition before and 
after birth, with the animals which lie immediately 
below in the scale — Man, if his adult and perfect struc- 
ture be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be ex- 
pected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He 
resembles them as they resemble one another — he diifers 
from them as they differ from one another. — And, 
though these differences and resemblances cannot be 
weighed and measured, their value may be readily esti- 
mated ; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that 
value being afforded and expressed by the system of 
classification of animals now current among zoologists. 

A careful study of the resemblances and differences 
presented by animals has, in fact, led naturalists to ar- 
range them into groups, or assemblages, all the members 
of each group presenting a certain amount of definable 
resemblance, and the number of points of similarity be- 
ing smaller as the group is larger and vice versa. Thus, 
all creatures which agree only in presenting the few 
distinctive marks of animality form the Kingdom Ani- 
MALiA. The numerous animals which agree only in pos- 
sessing the special characters of Vertebrates form one 
Sub-kingdom of this Kingdom. Then the Sub-kingdo;ii 
Vertebrata is subdivided into the five Classes, Fishes^ 
Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals, and these 
into smaller groups called Orders; these into Families 
and Genera; while the last are finally broken up into the 
smallest assemblages, which are distinguished by the 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 85 

possession of constant, not-sexual, characters. These 
"ultimate groups are Species. 

Every year tends to bring about a greater uniformity 
of opinion throughout the zoological world as to the 
limits and characters of these groups, great and small. 
At present, for example, no one has the least doubt 
regarding the characters of the classes Mammalia, Aves, 
or Reptilia ; nor does the question arise whether any 
thoroughly well-known animal should be placed in one 
class or the other. Again, there is a very general agree- 
ment respecting the characters and limits of the orders 
of Mammals, and as to the animals which are structur- 
ally necessitated to take a place in one or another order. 

^o one doubts, for example, that the Sloth and the 
Ant-eater, the Kangaroo and the Opossum, the Tiger 
and the Badger, the Tapir and the Rhinoceros, are 
respectively members of the same orders. These succes- 
sive pairs of animals may, and some do, differ from one 
another immensely, in such matters as the proportions 
and structure of their limbs ; the number of their dorsal 
and lumbar vertebrae ; the adaptation of their frames to 
climbing, leaping, or running; the number and form of 
their teeth ; and the characters of their skulls and of the 
contained brain. But, with all these differences, they 
are so closely connected in all the more important and 
fundamental characters of their oganization, and so 
distinctly separated by these same characters from other 
animals, that zoologists find it necessary to group them 
together as members of one order. And if any new 
animal were discovered, and were found to present no 
greater difference from the Kangaroo or from the Opos- 
sum, for example, than these animals do from one an- 
other, the zoologist would not only be logically com- 
pelled to rank it in the same order with these, but lie 
would not think of doing otherwise. 



86 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Bearing this obvious course of zoological reasoning in 
mind, let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our 
thinking selves from the mask of humanity ; let us ima- 
gine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly 
acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, 
and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a 
new and singular '^ erect and featherless biped/' which 
some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties 
of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant 
planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a 
cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing 
him among the mammalian vertebrates ; and his lower 
jaw, his molars, and his brain, w^ould leave no room for 
doubting the systematic position of the new genus 
among those mammals, whose young are nourished dur- 
ing gestation by means of a placenta, or what are called 
the '^ placental mammals." 

Further, the most superficial study would at once con- 
vince us that, among the orders of placental mammals, 
neither the Whales, nor the hoofed creatures, nor the 
Sloths and Ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous Cats, Dogs, 
and Bears, still less the Rodent Rats and Rabbits^ or the 
Insectivorous Moles and Hedgehogs, or the Bats, could 
claim our Homo, as one of themselves. 

There w^ould remain then but one order for compari- 
son, that of the Apes (using the word in its broadest 
sense), and the question for discussion would narrow 
itself to this — is Man so different from any of these 
Apes that he must form an order by himself ? Or does 
he differ less from them than they differ from one an- 
other, and hence must take his place in the same order 
with them ? 

Being happily free from all real, or imaginary, per- 
sonal interest in the results of the inquiry thus set afoot, 



Man and the lower animals. sT 

we should proceed to weigh the arguments on one side 
and on the other, with as much judicial calmness as if 
the question related to a new Opossum. We should en- 
deavour to ascertain, without seeking either to magnify 
or diminish them, all the characters by which our new 
Mammal differed from the Apes; and if we found that 
these were of less structural value than those which dis- 
tinguish certain members of the Ape order from others 
universally admitted to be of the same order, we should 
undoubtedly place the newly discovered tellurian genus 
with them. 

I now proceed to detail the facts which seem to me 
to leave us no choice but to adopt the last-mentioned 
course. 

It is quite certain that the Ape which most nearly ap- 
proaches man, in the totality of its organisation, is either 
the Chimpanzee or the Gorilla ; and as it makes no 
practical diif erence, for the purposes of my present argu- 
ment, which is selected for comparison, on the one hand, 
with Man, and on the other hand, with the rest of the 
Primates,^ I shall select the latter (so far as its organi- 
sation is known) — as a brute now so celebrated in prose 
and verse, that all must have heard of him, and have 
formed some conception of his appearance. I shall take 
up as many of the most important points of difference 
between man and this remarkable creature, as the sjDace 
at my disposal will allow me to discuss, and the neces- 
sities of the argument demand ; and I shall inquire into 
the value and magnitude of these differences, when 
placed side by side with those which separate the Gorilla 
from other animals of the same order. 

* We are not at present thoroughly acquainted with the 
brain of the Gorilla, and therefore, in discussing cerebral char- 
acters, I shall take that of the Chimpanzee as my highest term 
among the Apes. 



g§ MAN'S PLACE IN NATIJRfi. 

In tlie general proportions of the body and limbs tliere 
is a remarkable difference between the Gorilla and Man, 
which at once strikes the eye. The Gorilla's brain-case 
is smaller, its trnnk larger, its lower limbs shorter, its 
upper limbs longer in proportion than those of Man. 

I find that the vertebral column of a full-grown Gor- 
illa, in the Museum of the Eoyal College of Surgeons, 
measures 27 inches along its anterior curvature, from 
the upper edge of the atlas, or first vertebra of the neck, 
to the lower extremity of the sacrum; that the arm, 
without the hand, is 31^ inches long; that the leg, with- 
out the foot, is 26^ inches long; that the hand is 9f 
inches long; the foot 11^ inches long. 

In other words, taking the length of the spinal column 
as 100, the arm equals 115, the leg 96, the hand 36, and 
the foot 41. 

In the skeleton of a male Bosjesman, in the same col- 
lection, the j)roportions, by the same measurement, to 
the spinal column, taken as 100, are — the arm 78, the 
leg 110, the hand 26, and the foot 32. In a woman of 
the same race the arm is 83, and the leg 120, the hand 
and foot remaining the same. In a European skeleton I 
find the arm to be SO, the leg 117, the hand 26, the foot 
35. 

Thus the leg is not so different as it looks at first sight, 
in its proportion to the spine in the Gorilla and in the 
Man — being very slightly shorter than the spine in the 
former, and between -^ and -J- longer than the spi n 
the latter. The foot is longer and the hand much longer 
in the Gorilla ; but the great difference is caused by the 
arms, which are very much longer than the spine in the 
Gorilla, very much shorter than the spine in the Man. 

The question now arises how are the other Apes 
related to the Gorilla in these respects — taking the 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 89 

length of the spine, measured in the same way, at 100. 
In an adult Chimpanzee, the arm is only 96, the leg 90, 
the hand 43, the foot 39 — so that the hand and the leg 
depart more from the human proportion and the arm 
less, while the foot is about the same as in the Gorilla. 

In the Orang, the arms are very much longer than in 
the Gorilla (122), while the legs are shorter (88) ; the 
foot is longer than the hand (52 and 48), and both are 
much longer in proportion to the spine. 

In the other man-like Apes again, the Gibbons, these 
j)roportions are still further altered ; the length of the 
arms being to that of the spinal column as 19 to 11; 
while the legs are also a third longer than the spinal 
column, so as to be longer than in Man, instead of 
shorter. The hand is half as long as the spinal column, 
and the foot, shorter than the hand, is about -j^yths of 
the length of the spinal column. 

Thus Hylohates is as much longer in the arms than 
the Gorilla, as the Gorilla is longer in the arms than 
Man ; while, on the other hand, it is as much longer iu 
the legs than the Man, as the Man is longer in the legs 
than the Gorilla, so that it contains within itself the 
extremest deviations from the average length to both 
pairs of limbs."^ 

The Mandrill presents a middle condition, the arms 
and legs being nearly equal in length, and both being 
shorter than the spinal column; while hand and foot 
have nearly the same proportions to one another and to 
the spine, as in Man. 

In the Spider Monkey (Ateles) the leg is longer than 
the spine, and the arm than the leg ; and, finally, in that 
remarkable Lemurine form, the Indri (Lichanotus) , the 

* See tlie figures of the skeletons of four anthropoid ape^ 
and of man. drawn to scale^ p, 71, 



90 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

leg is about as long as the spinal column, while the 
arm is not more than |i of its length; the hand having 
rather less and the foot rather more, than one third the 
length of the spinal column. 

These examples might be greatly multiplied, but they 
suffice to show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs 
the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart 
still more widely from the Gorilla and that, conse- 
quently, such differences of proportion can have no 
ordinal value. 

We may next consider the differences presented by 
the trunk, consisting of the vertebral column, or back- 
bone, and the ribs and pelvis, or bony hipbasin, which 
are connected with it, in Man and in the Gorilla 
respectively. 

In Man, in consequence partly of the disposition of 
the articular surfaces of the vertebrae, and largely of the 
elastic tension of some of the fibrous bands, or ligaments, 
the spinal column, as a whole, has an elegant S-.ike 
curvature, being convex forwards in the neck, concave 
in the back, convex in the loins, or lumbar region, and 
concave again in the sacral region ; an arrangement 
which gives much elasticity to the whole backbone, and 
diminishes the jar communicated to the spine, and 
through it to the head, by locomotion in the erect 
position. 

Furthermore, under ordinary circumstances, Man has 
seven vertebrae in his neck, which are called cervical; 
twelve succeed these, bearing ribs and forming the upper 
part of the back, whence they are termed dorsal; five 
lie in the loins, bearing no distinct, or free, ribs, and 
are called lumhar; five, united together into a great 
bone, excavated in front, solidly wedged in between 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 91 

the bip bones, to form the back of the pelvis, and 
known by the name of the sacrum, succeed these; and 
finally, three or four little more or less movable bones, so 
small as to be insignificant, constitute the coccyx or 
rudimentary tail. 

In the Gorilla, the vertebral column is similarly di- 
vided into cervical, dorsal, lumbar, sacral, and coccygeal 
vertebra^, and the total number of cervical and dorsal 
vertebra;, taken together, is the same as in Man ; but the 
development of a pair of ribs to the first lumbar ver- 
tebra, which is an exceptional occurrence in Man, is the 
rule in the Gorilla; and hence, as lumbar are distin- 
guished from dorsal vertebrae only by the presence or ab- 
sence of free ribs, the seventeen " dorso-lumbar " ver- 
tebra3 of the Gorilla are divided into thirteen dorsal and 
four lumbar, while in Man they are twelve dorsal and 
■Q-ve lumbar. 

!N'ot only, hoAvever, does Man occasionally possess 

thirteen pair of ribs,"^ but the Gorilla sometimes has 

fourteen pairs, while an Orang-Utan skeleton in the 

Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons has twelve 

dorsal and five lumbar vertebrae, as in Man. Cuvier 

notes the same number in a Hylobates. On the other 

hand, among the lower Apes, many possess twelve dorsal 

and six or seven lumbar vertebrae; the Douroucouli 

has fourteen dorsal and eight lumbar, and a Lemur 

(Stenops tardigradus) has fifteen dorsal and nine 

lumbar vertebrae. 

* " More than once," says Peter Camper, " have I met with 
more than six lumbar vertebrse in man. . . . Once I found 
thirteen ribs and four lumbar vertebrae." Fallopius noted thir- 
teen pair of ribs and only four lumbar vertebrse; and Eustachius 
once found eleven dorsal vertebrse and six lumbar vertebraB. — 
(Euvres de Pierre Camper, T. 1, p. 42. As Tyson states, his 
" Pygmie " had thirteen pair of ribs and five lumbar verte- 
bras. The question of the curves of the spinal column in the 
Apes requires further investigation. 



92 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

The vertebral column of the Gorilla, as a whole, dif- 
fers from that of Man in the less marked character of its 
curves, especially in the slighter convexity of the lumbar 
region. ^Nevertheless, the curves are present, and are 
quite obvious in young skeletons of the Gorilla and 
Chimpanzee which have been prepared without removal 
of the ligaments. In young Orangs similarly preserved 
on the other hand, the spinal co.umn is either straight, 
or even concave forwards, throughout the lumbar 
region. 

Whether we take these characters then, or such minor 
ones as those which are derivable from the proportional 
length of the spines of the cervical vertebrae, and the like, 
there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference 
between Man and the Gorilla ; but there is as little, that 
equally marked differences, of the very same order, 
obtain between the Gorilla and the lower Apes. 

The Pelvis, or bony girdle of the hips, of Man is a 
strikingly human part of his organisation ; the ex- 
panded haunch bones affording support for his viscera 
during his habitually erect posture, and giving space 
for the attachment of the great muscles which enable 
him to assume and to preserve that attitude. In these 
respects the pelvis of the Gorilla differs very consider- 
ably from his (Fig. 16). But go no lower than the 
Gibbon, and see how vastly more he differs from the 
Gorilla than the latter does from Man, even in this 
structure. Look at the flat, narrow haunch bones — the 
long and narrow passage — the coarse, outwardly curved, 
ischiatic prominences on which the Gibbon habitually 
rests, and which are coated by the so-called " callosities,'^ 
dense patches of skin, wholly absent in the Gorilla, in 
the Chimpanzee, and in the Orang, as in Man ! 
In the lower Monkeys and in the Lemurs the difference 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 



9a 



becomes more striking still, the pelvis acquiring an al= 
together qiiadriipedal character. 




Giobon. 



Fig. 16. — Front and side views of the bony pelvis of Man, 
the Gorilla and Gibbon: reduced from drawings made from 
nature, of the same absolute length, by Mr. Waterhouse Haw- 
kins. 

But now let us turn to a nobler and more character- 
istic organ — that by which the human frame seems to be, 



94 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURK. 

and indeed is, so strongly distinguished from all others, 
— I mean the skull. The differences between a Gorilla's 
skull and a Man's are truly immense (Fig. 17). In the 
former, the face, formed largely by the massive jaw- 
bones, predominates over the brain-case, or cranium 
proper: in the latter, the proportions of the two are 
reversed. In the Man, the occipital foramen, through 
which passes the great nervous cord connecting the brain 
with the nerves of the body, is placed just behind the 
centre of the base of the skull, which thus becomes evenly 
balanced in the erect posture; in the Gorilla, it lies in 
the posterior third of that base. In the Man, the sur- 
face of the skull is comparatively smooth, and the 
supraciliary ridges or brow prominences usually project 
but little — while, in the Gorilla, vast crests are devel- 
oped upon the skull, and the brow ridges overhang the 
cavernous orbits, like great penthouses. 

Sections of the skulls, however, show that some of the 
apparent defects of the Gorilla's cranium arise, in fact, 
not so much from deficiency of braincase as from 
excessive development of the parts of the face. The 
cranial cavity is not ill-shaped, and the forehead is not 
truly flattened or very retreating, its really well-formed 
curve being simply disguised by the mass of bone which 
is built up against it (Fig. 17). 

But the roofs of the orbits rise more obliquely into 
the cranial cavity, thus diminishing the space for the 
lower part of the anterior lobes of the brain, and the 
absolute capacity of the cranium is far less than that of ^ 
Man. So far as I am aware, no human cranium 
belonging to an adult man has yet been observed with 
a less cubical capacity than 62 cubic inches, the smallest 
cranium observed in any race of men by Morton, 
measuring 63 cubic inches ; while, on the other hand, 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 95 

the most capacious Gorilla skull yet measured has a 
content of not more than 34^ cubic inches. Let us as- 
sume^ for simplicity's sake, that the lowest Man's skull 
has twice the capacity of that of the highest Gorilla." 

Iso doubtj this is a very striking difference, but it 
loses much of its apparent systematic value, when 
viewed by the light of certain other equally indubitable 
facts respecting cranial capacities. 

The first of these is, that the difference in the volume 
of the cranial cavity of different races of mankind is 
far greater, absolutely, than that between the lowest 
Man and the highest Ape, while, relatively, it is about 
the same. For the largest human skull measured by 

* It has been affirmed that Hindoo crania sometimes contain 
as little as 27 ounces of water, which would give a capacity of 
about 46 cubic inches. The minimum capacity which I have 
assumed above, however, is based upon the valuable tables pub- 
lished by Professor R. Wagner in his Vorstuclien zu einer 
ivissenschaftlichen Morphologie unci Physiologie cles mensch- 
lichen Gehrins. As the result of the careful weighing of more 
than 900 human brains, Professor Wagner states that one- 
half weighed between 1200 and 1400 grammes, and that about 
two-ninths, consisting for the most part of male brains, ex- 
ceed 1400 grammes. The lightest brain of an adult male, with 
sound mental faculties, recorded by Wagner, weighed 1020 
grammes. As a gramme equals 15.4 grains, and a cubic inch 
of water contains 252.4 grains, this is equivalent to 62 cubic 
inches of water; so that as brain is heavier than water, we are 
perfectly safe against erring on the side of diminution in tak- 
ing this as the smallest capacity of any adult male human 
brain. The only adult male brain, weighing as little as 970 
grammes, is that of an idiot; but the brain of an adult woman, 
against the soundness of whose faculties nothing appears, 
v/eighed as little as 907 grammes (55.3 cubic inches of water) ; 
and Reid gives an adult female brain of still smaller capacity. 
The heaviest brain (1872 grammes, or about 115 cubic inches) 
was, however, that of a woman; next to it comes the brain 
of Cuvier (1861 grammes), then Byron (1807 grammes), and 
then an insane person (1783 grammes). The lightest adult 
brain recorded (720 grammes) was that of an idiotic female. 
The brains of five children, four years old, weighed between 
1275 and 992 grammes. So that it may be safely said, that an 
average European child of four years old has a brain twice as 
large as that of an adult Gorilla. 



96 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Morton contained 114 cubic inches, tliat is to say, had 
very nearly double the capacity of the smallest; while 
its absolute preponderance, of 52 cubic inches — is far 
greater than that by which the lowest adult male human 
cranium surpasses the largest of the Gorillas (62 — 34^ 
■ — 27^). Secondly, the adult crania of Gorillas which 
have as yet been measured differ among themselves by 
nearly one-third, the maximum capacity being 34.5 
cubic inches, the minimum 24 cubic inches ; and, thirdly, 
after making all due allowance for difference of size, the 
cranial capacities of some of the lower Apes fall nearly 
as much, relatively, below those of the higher Apes as 
the latter fall below Man. 

Thus, even in the important matter of cranial capa- 
city. Men differ more widely from one another than 
they do from the Apes ; while the lowest Apes differ as 
much in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does 
from Man. The last proposition is still better illus- 
trated by the study of the modifications which other 
parts of the cranium undergo in the Simian series. 

It is the large proportional size of the facial bones 
and the great projection of the jaws which confer upon 
the Gorilla's skull its small facial angle and brutal 
character. 

But if we consider the proportional size of the facial 
bones to the skull proper only, the little Clirysothrix 
(Fig. 17) differs very widely from the Gorilla, and, in 
the same way, as Man does,; while the Baboons (Cyno- 
cepJialus^ Fig. 17) exaggerate the gross proportions of 
the muzzle of the great Anthropoid, so that its visage 
looks mild and human by comparison with theirs. The 
difference between the Gorilla and the Baboon is even 
greater than it appears at first sight ; for the great facial 
mass of the former is largely due to a downward 



Man and the lower animals. 



m 



ATTSTHAIilAN. 



nrRTSOTHBlX. 



GOHXLI^^ 




CYNOCEPHALIJSL 



MTCETES. 



TiEMtrm, 



Fig. 17. — Sections of the skulls of Man and various Apes, 
drawn so as to give the cerebral cavity the same length in 
each case, thereby displaying the varying proportions of the 
facial bones. The line & indicates the plane of the tentorium, 
which separates the cerebrum from the cerebellum; d, the axis 
of the occipital outlet of the skull. The extent of cerebral 



^8 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE 

cavity behind c, which is a perpendicular erected on h at tte 
point where the tentorium is attached posteriorly, indicates 
the degree to which the cerebrum overlaps the cerebellum — ths 
space occupied by which is roughly indicated by the dark 
shading. In comparing these diagrams, it must be recollected, 
that figures on so small a scale as these simply exemplify the 
statements in the text, the proof of which is to be found in 
the objects themselves. 

development of the jaws; an essentially human char- 
acter, superadded upon that almost purely forward, 
essentially brutal, development of the same parts which 
characterises the Baboon, and yet more remarkably 
distinguishes the Lemur. 

Similarly, the occipital foramen of Mycetes (Fig. 
17), and still more of the Lemurs, is situated completely 
in the posterior face of the skull, or as much further back 
than that of the Gorilla, as that of the Gorilla is fur- 
ther back than that of Man ; while, as if to render 
patent the fi.tility of the attempt to base any broad 
classiiicatory distinction on such a character, the same 
group of Platyrhine, or American monkeys, to which 
the Mycetes belongs, contains the Chrysothrix, whose 
occipital foramen is situated far more forward than in 
any other ape, and nearly approaches the position it 
holds in Man. 

Again, the Orang's skull is as devoid of excessively 
developed supraciliary prominences as a Man's, though 
some varieties exhibit great crests elsewhere (See p. 
25) ; and in some of the Cebine apes and in the Chryso- 
tlirix, the cranium is as smooth and rounded as that of 
Man himself. 

What is true of these leading characteristics of the 
skull, holds good, as may be imagined, of all minor 
features ; so that for every constant difference between 
the Gorilla's skull and the Man's a similar constant 
difference of the same order (that is to say, consisting 



MAK AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 99' 

in excess or defect of the same quality) may be found 
between the Gorilla's skull and that of some other ape. 
So that, for the skull, no less than for the skeleton in 
general, the proposition holds good, that the differences 
between Man and the Gorilla are of smaller value than 
those between the Gorilla and some other Apes. 

In connection wuth the skull, I may speak of the 
teeth — organs which have a peculiar classificatory value, 
and whose resemblances and differences of number, 
form, and succession, taken as a whole, are usually re- 
garded as more trustworthy indicators of affinity than 
any others. 

Man is provided with two sets of teeth — milk teeth 
and permanent teeth. The former consist of four in- 
cisors, or cutting teeth; two canines, or eye-teeth; and 
four molars or grinders, in each jaw, making twenty 
in all. The latter (Fig. 18) comprise four incisors, two 
canines, four small grinders^ called premolars or false 
molars, and six large grinders, or true molars in each 
jaw — making thirty-two in all. The internal incisors 
are larger than the external pair, in the ujDper jaw, 
smaller than the external pair in the low^er jaw. The 
crowns of the upper molars exhibit four cusps, or blunt- 
pointed elevations, and a ridge crosses the crown ob- 
liquely, from the inner, anterior cusp to the outer, post- 
erior cusp (Fig. 18 m^). The anterior lower molars 
have five cusps, three external and two internal. The 
premolars have two cusps, one internal and one external, 
of which the outer is higher. 

In all these respects the dentition of the Gorilla may 
be described in the same terms as that of Man; but in 
other matters it exhibits many and important differences 
(Fig. 18). 



loo MAN'S IPLACE m NATOHE. 

Thus the teeth of man constitute a regular and even 
series-— without any break and without any marked 
projection of one tooth above the level of the rest; a 
peculiarity which, as Cuvier long ago showed, is shared 
by no other mammal save one — as different a creature 
from man as can well be imagined — namely, the long- 
extinct Aiioplotherium. The teeth of the Gorilla, on the 
CO itrary, exhibit a break, or interval, termed the dia- 
stema, in both jaws: in front of the eyetooth, or between 
it and the outer incisor, in the upper jaw; behind the 
eye-tooth, or between it and the front false molar, in the 
lower jaw. Into this break in the series, in each jaw, 
fits the canine of the opposite jaw; the size of the eye- 
tooth in the Gorilla being so great that it projects, like 
a tusk, far beyond the general level of the other teeth. 
The roots of the false molar teeth of the Gorilla, again, 
are more complex than in Man,. and the proportional size 
of the molars is diiferent. The Gorilla has the crown 
of the hindmost grinder of the lower jaw more complex, 
and the order of eruption of the permanent teeth is 
different; the permanent canines making their appear- 
ance before the second and third molars in Man, and 
after them in the Gorilla. 

Thus, while the teeth of the Gorilla closely resemble 
those of Man in number, kind, and in the general pattern 
of their crowns, they exhibit marked differences from 
those of Man in secondary respects, such as relative size, 
number of fangs, and order of appearance. 

But, if the teeth of the Gorilla be compared with those 
of an Ape, no further removed from it than a Cynoce- 
lohalus, or Baboon, it will be found that differences and 
resemblances of the same order are easily observable ; but 
that many of the points in which the Gorilla resembles 
Man as those in which it differs from the Baboon j 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 



101 



while various respects in which it differs from Man 
are exaggerated in the Cynocephalus. The number 



Man. 




\/ ^^ 771-2 m^ 





Cynocephcdus, Awt j 




TJt^ 





X>5 



Chdrcmy^ 



Fig. 18. — Lateral views, of tlie same length, of the upper 
jaws of various Primates, i, incisors; c, canines; pm, premo- 
lars; m, molars. A line is drawn through the first molar of 
Man, Gorilla, Cynocephalus, and Cehus, and the grinding sur- 
face of the second molar is shown in each, its anterior and 
internal angle being just above the m of m^. 



102 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

and the nature of the teeth remain the same in the 
Baboon as in the Gorilla and in Man. But the pattern 
of the Baboon's upper molars is quite different from that 
described above (Fig. 18), the canines are proportion- 
ally longer and more knife-like ; the anterior premolar 
in the lower jaw is specially modified; the posterior 
molar of the lower jaw is still larger and more complex 
than in the Gorilla. 

Passing from the old-world Apes to those of the new 
world, we meet with a change of much greater import- 
ance than any of these. In such a genus as Cehus, for 
example (Fig. 18), it will be found that while in some 
secondary points, such as the projection of the canines 
and the diastema, the resemblance to the great ape is 
preserved; in other and most important respects, the 
dentition is extremely different. Instead of 20 teeth in 
the milk set, there are 24 : instead of 32 teeth in the per- 
manent set, there are 36, the false molars being in- 
creased from eight to twelve. And in form, the crowns 
of the molars are very unlike those of the Gorilla, and 
differ far more widely from the human pattern. 

The Marmosets, on the other hand, exhibit the same 
number of teeth as Man and the Gorilla ; but, not- 
withstanding this, their dentition is very different, for 
they have four more false molars, like the other Am- 
erican monkeys — but as they have four fewer true 
molars, the total remains the same. iVnd passing from 
the American apes to the Lemurs, the dentition be- 
comes still more completely and essentially different 
from that of the Gorilla. The incisors begin to vary 
both in number and in form. The molars acquire, 
more and more, a many-pointed, insectivorous character, 
and in one Genus, the Aye- Aye (Cheiromys), the ca- 
nines disappear, and the teeth completely simulate those 
of a Eodent (Fig. 18). 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 103 

Hence it is obvious that, greatly as the dentition of the 
highest Ape differs from that of Man, it differs far more 
widely from that of the lower and lowest Apes. 

Whatever part of the animal fabric — whatever series 
of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for com- 
parison — the result would be the same — the lower Apes 
and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and 
the Man. I cannot attempt in this place to follow out- 
all these comparisons in detail, and indeed it is un- 
necessary I should do so. But certain real, or supposed, 
structural distinctions between man and the apes remain, 
upon which so much stress has been laid, that they re- 
quire careful consideration, in order that the true value 
may be assigned to those which are real, and the empti- 
ness of those which are fictitious may be exposed. I 
refer to the characters of the hand, the foot, and the 
brain. 

Man has been defined as the only animal possessed of 
two hands terminating his fore limbs, and of two feet 
ending his hind limbs, while it has been said that all the 
apes possess four hands; and he has been affirmed to 
differ fundamentally from all the apes in the characters 
of his brain, which alone, it has been strangely asserted 
and reasserted, exhibits the structures known to ana- 
tomists as the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu of the 
lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor. 

That the former proposition should have gained 
general acceptance is not surprising — indeed, at first 
sight, appearances are much in its favour : but, as for 
the second, one can only admire the surpassing courage 
of its enunciator, seeing that it is an innovation which 
is not only opposed to generally and justly accepted 
doctrines, but which is directly negatived by the testi- 



104 MAN'S PLACE IN NATUHE. 

mony of all original inquirers, who have specially inves- 
tigated the matter : and that it neither has been, nor can 
be, supported by a single anatomical preparation. It 
would, in fact, be unworthy of serious refutation, except 
for the general and natural belief that deliberate and 
reiterated assertions must have some foundation. 

Before we can discuss the first point with advantage 
we must consider with some attention, and compare to- 
gether, the structure of the human hand and that of the 
human foot, so that we may have distinct and clear 
ideas of what constitutes a hand and what a foot. 

The external form of the human hand is familiar 
enough to every one. It consists of a stout wrist fol- 
lowed by a broad palm, formed of flesh, and tendons, and 
skin, binding together four bones, and dividing into four 
long and flexible digits, or fingers, each of which bears 
on the back of its last joint a broad and flattened nail. 
The longest cleft between any two digits is rather less 
than half as long as the hand. From the outer side of 
the base of the palm a stout digit goes off, having only 
two joints instead of three ; so short, that it only reaches 
to a little beyond the middle of the first joint of the 
finger next it ; and further remarkable by its great 
mobility, in consequence of which it can be directed 
outwards, almost at a right angle to the rest. This 
digit is called the '' 'poUex^ or thumb ; and, like the 
others, it bears a flat nail upon the back of its terminal 
joint. In consequence of the proportions and mobility 
of the thumb, it is what is termed ^' opposable " ; in other 
w^ords, its extremity can, with the greatest ease, be 
brought into contact with the extremities of any of the 
fingers; a property upon which the possibility of our 
carrying into effect the conceptions of the mind so 
largely depends. 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 105 

The external form of the foot differs widely from that 
of the hand; and yet, when closely compared, the two 
present some singular resemblances. Thus the ankle 
corresponds in a manner with the wrist ; the sole with 
the palm; the toes with the fingers; the great toe with 
the thumb. But the toes, or digits of the foot, are far 
shorter in proportion than the digits of the hand, and are 
less moveable, the want of mobility being most striking 
in the great toe — which, again, is very much larger in 
proportion to the other toe than the thumb to the 
fingers. In considering this point, however, it must not 
be forgotten that the civilized great toe, confined and 
cramped from childhood upwards^ is seen to a great dis- 
advantage, and that in uncivilized and barefooted people 
it retains a great amount of mobility, and even some 
sort of opposability. The Chinese boatmen are said to be 
able to pull an oar ; the artisans of Bengal to weave, and 
the Carajas to steal fishhooks by its help; though, after 
all, it must be recollected that the structure of its joints 
and the arrangement of its bones, necessarily render its 
prehensile action far less perfect than that of the 
thum.b. 

But to gain a precise conception of the resemblances 
and differences of the hand and foot, and of the dis- 
tinctive characters of each, we mjast look below the skin, 
and compare the bony framework and its motor ap- 
paratus in each (Fi^\ 19). 

The skeleton of the hand exhibits, in the region which 
we term the wrist, and which is technically called the 
carpus — two rows of closely fitted polygonal bones, four 
in each row, which are tolerably equal in size. The 
bones of the first row^ with the bones of the forearm 
form the wrist joint, and are arranged side by side, no 
one greatly exceeding or overlapping the rest. 



106 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



Three of tlie bones of the second row of tlie carpus 
bear the four long bones Avhich support the palm of the 
hand. The fifth bone of the same character is articu- 
lated in a much more free and moveable manner than 
the others, with its carpal bone, and forms 'he base of 
the thumb. These are called 7netacarpal bones, and 
thay carry the phalanges or bones of the digits, of which 




Uarwr. 



Foot. 



Fig. 19. — The skeleton of the Hand and Foot of Man reduced 
from Dr. Carter's drawings in Gray's Anatomy. The hand is 
drawn to a larger scale than the foot. The line a a in the 
hand indicates the boundary between the carpus and the meta- 
carpus; 1) b that between the latter and the proximal pha- 
langes; c c marks the ends of the distal phalanges. The 
line a' a' in the foot indicates the boundary between the tarsus 
and metatarsus; &' &' marks that between the metatarsus and 
the proximal phalanges; and c' c' bounds the ends of the distal 
phalanges; ca, the calcaneum; as, the astragalus; sc, the sca.- 
phoid bone in the tarsus. 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 107 

there are two in the thumb, and three in each of the 
fingers. 

The skeleton of the foot is very like that of the hand 
in some respects. Thus there are three phalanges in each 
of the lesser toes, and only two in the great toe, which 
answers to the thumb. There is a long bone, termed 
metatarsal, answering to the metacarpal, for each digit ; 
and the tarsus which corresponds with the carpus, pre- 
sents four short polygonal bones in a row, which cor- 
respond very closely with the four carpal bones of the 
second row of the hand. In other respects the foot 
differs very widely from the hand. Thus the great toe 
is the longest digit but one ; and its metatarsal is far less 
moveably articulated with the tarsus than the meta- 
carpal of the thumb with the carpus. But a far more 
important distinction lies in the fact that, instead of 
four more tarsal bones there are only three ; and, that 
these three are not arranged side by side, or in one row. 
One of them, the os calcis or heel bone (ca), lies ex- 
ternally, and sends back the large projecting heel ; an- 
other, the astragalus (as), rests on this by one face, and 
by another forms, with the bones of the leg, the ankle 
joint ; while a third face, directed forwards, is separated 
from the three inner tarsal bones of the row next the 
metatarsus by a bone ca.led the scaphoid (sc). 

Thus there is a fundamental difference in the struc- 
ture of the foot and the hand, observable when the carpus 
and the tarsus are contrasted : and there are differences 
of degree noticeable when the proportions and the mo- 
bility of the metacapals and metatarsals, with their 
respective digits, are compared together. 

The same two classes of differences become obvious 
when the muscles of the hand are compared with those, 
of the foot. 



108 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

Three principal sets of muscles, called ^^ flexors,'' 
bend the fingers and thumb, as in clenching the list, and 
three sets, — the extensors — extend them, as in straight- 
ening the fingers. These muscles are all '' long mus- 
cles " that is to say, the fleshy part of each, lying in and 
being fixed to the bones of the arm, is at the other end, 
continued into tendons, or rounded cords, which pass 
into the hand, and are ultimately fixed to the bones 
which are to be moved. Thus, when the fingers are 
bent, the fleshy parts of the flexors of the fingers, placed 
in the arm, contract, in virtue of their peculiar en- 
dowment as muscles ; and pulling the tendinous cords, 
connecting with their ends, cause them to pull down the 
bones of the fingers towards the palm. 

;^ot only are the principal flexors of the fingers and of 
the thumb long muscles, but they remain quite distinct 
from one another throughout their whole length. 

In the foot, there are also three principal flexor 
muscles of the digits or toes, and three principal ex- 
tensors; but one extensor and one flexor are short- mus- 
cles ; that is to say, their fleshy parts are not situated in 
the leg (which corresponds with the arm), but in the 
back and in the sole of the foot — regions which cor- 
respond with the back and the palm of the hand. 

Again, the tendons of the long flexor of the toes, and 
of the long flexor of the great toe, when they reach the 
sole of the foot, do not remain distinct from one another, 
gs tiie flexors in the palm of the hand do, but they be- 
come united and commingled in a very curious manner 
— while their united tendons receive an accessory mus- 
cle connected with the heel-bone. 

But perhaps the most absolutely distinctive char- 
acter about the muscles of the foot is the existence 
of what is termed the perottceiis longus^ a long muscle 



Man and the lower animals. loo 

fixed to the outer bone of the leg, and sending its tendon 
to the outer ankle, behind and below which it passes, and 
then crosses the foot obliquely to be attached to the base 
of the great toe. Xo muscle in the hand exactly cor- 
responds with this, which is eminently a foot muscle. 

To resume — the foot of man is distinguished from 
his hand by the following absolute anatomical differ- 
ences : — 

1. By the arrangement of the tarsal bones. 

2. By having a short flexor and a short extensor 

muscle of the digits. 

3. By possessing the muscle termed peronceus 
longus. 

And if we desire to ascertain whether the terminal 
division of a limb, in other Primates, is to be called a 
foot or a hand, it is by the presence or absence of these 
characters that we must be guided, and not by the mere 
proportions and greater or lesser mobility of the great 
toe, which may vary indefinitely without any funda- 
mental alteration in the structure of the foot. 

Keeping these considerations in mind, let us now turn 
to the limbs of the Gorilla. The terminal division of 
the fore limb presents no difficulty — bone for bone and 
muscle for muscle, are found to be arranged essentially 
as in man, or with such minor differences as are found 
as varieties in man. The Gorilla's hand is clumsier, 
heavier, and has a thumb somewhat shorter in pro- 
portion than that of man ; but no one has ever doubted 
it being a true hand. 

At first sight, the termination of the hind limb of the 
Gorilla looks very hand-like, and as it is still more so in 
many of the lower apes, it is not wonderful that the 
appellation '^ Quadrumana/' or four-handed creatures, 



llO MAN'S t^LACE IN NATUE:E1. 

adopted from tlie older anatomists^ by Blumenbach, and 
unfortunately rendered current by Cuvier, should have 
gained such wide acceptance as a name for the Simian 
group. But the most cursory anatomical investigation 
at once proves that the resemblance of the so-called 
" hind hand " to a true hand, is only skin deep, and that, 
in all essential respects, the hind limb of the Gorilla is as 
truly terminated by a foot as that of man. The tarsal 
bones, in all important circumstances of number, dis- 
position, and form, resemble those of man (Fig. 20). 
The metatarsals and digits, on the other hand, are pro- 
portionally longer and more slender, Avhile the great toe 
is not only proportionally shorter and weaker, but its 
metatarsal bone is united by a more moveable joint with 
the tarsus. At the same time, the foot is set more 
obliquely upon the leg than in man. 

As to the muscles, there is a short flexor, a short ex- 
tensor, and a peronwus longus, while the tendons of the 
long flexors of the great toe and of the other toes are 
united together and with an accessory fleshy bundle. 

The hind limb of the Gorilla, therefore, ends in a true 
foot, with a very moveable great toe. It is a prehensile 
foot, indeed, but is in no sense a hand ; it is a foot w^hich 



* In speaking of the foot of his " Pygmie," Tyson remarks, 
p. 13: — 

" But this part in the formation and in its function too, 
being liker a Hand than a Foot : for the distinguishing this 
sort of animals from others, I have thought whether it might 
not be reckoned and called rather Quadru-nianus than Quad- 
rupes, i. e. a four-handed rather than a four-footed animal." 

As this passage was published in 1699, M. I. G. St. Hilaire 
is clearly in error in ascribing the invention of the term 
" quadrumanus " to Buffon, though " bimanous " may belong 
to him. Tyson uses " Quadrumanus " in several places, as at 
p. 91. . . . " Our Pygmie is no Man, nor yet the common 
Ave, but a sort of Animoal between both; and though a Biped, 
yet of the Quadrumanus-kind: though some 3Ien too have been 
observed to use their Feet like Hands as I have seen several," 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. HI 

differs from that of man not in any fundamental char- 
acter, but in mere proportions, in the degree of mobility, 
and in the secondary arrangement of its parts. 

It must not be supposed, however, because I speak of 
these differences as not fundamental, that I wish to 
underrate their value. They are important enough in 
their way, the structure of the foot being in strict cor- 
relation with that of the rest of the organism in each 
case. I^or can it be doubted that the greater division of 
physiological labour in Man, so that the function of sup- 
port is thrown wholly on the leg and foot, is an advance 
in organization of very great moment to him ; but, after 
all, regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the 
foot of ]\Ian and the foot of the Gorilla are far more 
striking and important than the differences. 

I have dwelt upon this point at length, because it is 
one regarding which much delusion prevails ; but I 
might have passed it over without detriment to mj argu- 
ment, which only requires me to show that, be the differ- 
ences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the 
Gorilla what they may — the differences between those 
of the Gorilla, and those of the lower A^es are much 
greater. 

It is not necessary to descend lower in the scale than 
the Orang for conclusive evidence on this head. 

The thumb of the Orang differs more from that of the 
Gorilla than the thumb of the Gorilla differs from that 
of Man, not only by its shortness, but by the absence of 
any special long flexor muscle. The carpus of the 
Orang, like that of most lower apes, contains nine bones, 
while in the Gorilla, as in Man and the Chimpanzee, 
there are onlv ei2:ht. 

The Orang's'foot (Fig., 20) is still more aberrant; its 
very long toes and short tarsus, short great toe, short and 



112 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



raised heel, great obliquity of articulation with the leg, 
and absence of a long flexor tendon to the great toe, 
separating it far more ^videly from the foot of the Gor- 
illa than the latter is separated from that of Man. 

But, in some of the lower apes, the hand and foot 
diverge still more from those of the Gorilla, than they do 
in the Orang. The thumb ceases to be opposable in the 




Man 



OrcLitg 



Fig. 20. — Foot of Man, Gorilla, and Orang-Utan of the same 
absolute length, to show the differences in proportion of each. 
Letters as in Fig. 19. Reduced from original drawings by Mr. 
Waterhouse Hawkins. 



American monkeys ; is reduced to a mere rudiment cov- 
ered by the skin in the Spider Monkey ; and is directed 
forwards and armed with a curved claw like the other 
digits, in the Marmosets — so that, in all these cases, 
there can be no doubt but that the hand is more different 
from that of the Gorilla than the Gorilla's hand is from 
Man's. 



MAN AMD fSE LOWm ANIMALS. Hg 

And as to the foot, the great toe of the Marmoset is 
still more insignificant in proportion than that of the 
Orang- — while in the Lemurs it is very large, and as 
completely thumh-like and opposable as in the Gorilla — - 
but in these animals the second toe is often irregularly 
modified, and in some species the two principal bones of 
the tarsus, the astragalus and the os calcis, are so im- 
mensely elongated as to render the foot, so far, totally 
unlike that of any other mammal. 

So with regard to the muscles. The short flexor of 
the toes of the Gorilla differs from that of Man by the 
circumstance that one slip of the muscle is attached, not 
to the heel bone, but to the tendons of the long flexors. 
The lower Apes depart from the Gorilla by an exaggera- 
tion of the same character, two, three, or more, slips 
becoming fixed to the long flexor tendons — or by a multi- 
plication of the slips. — Again, the Gorilla differs slightly 
from Man in the mode of interlacing of the long flexor 
tendons : and the lower apes differ from the Gorilla in 
exhibiting yet other, sometimes very complex, arrange- 
ments of the same parts, and occasionally in the absence 
of the accessory fleshy bundle. 

Throughout all these modifications it must be recol- 
lected that the foot loses no one of its essential charac- 
ters. Every Monkey and Lemur exhibits the character- 
istic arrangement of tarsal bones, possesses a short flexor 
and short extensor muscle, and a loeronoeus longus. 
Varied as the proportions and appearance of the organ 
may be, the terminal division of the hind limb remains, 
in plan and principle of construction, a foot, and never, 
in those respects, can be confounded with a hand. 

Hardly any part of the bodily frame, then, could be 
found better calculated to illustrate the truth that the 
structural differences between Man and the highest Ape 

8 



Il4 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

are of less value than those between the highest and 
the lower Apes, than the hand or the foot; and yet, per- 
haps, there is one organ the study of which enforces the 
same conclusion in a still more striking manner — and 
that is the Brain. 

But before entering upon the precise question of the 
amount of difference between the Ape's brain and that 
of Man, it is necessary that we should clearly understand 
what constitutes a great, and what a small difference in 
cerebral structure; and w^e shall be best enabled to do 
this by a brief study of the chief modifications which 
the brain exhibits in the series of vertebrate animals. 

The brain of a fish is very small, compared with th^ 
spinal cord into which it is continued, and with the 
nerves which come off from it : of the segments of which 
it is composed — the olfactory lobes, the cerebral hemi- 
spheres, and the succeeding divisions — no one predomi- 
nates so much over the rest as to obscure or cover them ; 
and the so-called optic lobes are, frequently, the largest 
masses of all. In Reptiles, the mass of the brain, rela- 
tively to the spinal cord, increases and the cerebral hemi- 
spheres begin to predominate over the other parts ; while 
in Birds this predominance is still more marked. The 
brain of the lowest Mammals, such as the duck-billed 
Platypus and the Opossums and Kangaroos, exhibits a 
still more definite advance in the same direction. The 
cerebral hemispheres have now so much increased in size 
as, more or less, to hide the representatives of the optic 
lobes, which remain comparatively small, so that the 
brain of a Marsupial is extremely different from that of 
a Bird, Reptile, or Fish. A step higher in the scale^ 
among the placental Mammals, the structure of the brain 
acquires a vast modification — not that it appears much 
altered externally, in a Rat or in a Rabbit, from what it 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. ll§ 

is in a Marsupial— nor that the proportions of its parts 
are much changed, but an apparently new structure is 
found between the cerebral hemispheres, connecting 
them together, at what is called the "great commissure " 
" corpus callosum." The subject requires careful re- 
investigation, but if the currently received statements 
are correct, the appearance of the '^ corpus callosum " iii 
the placental mammals is the greatest and most suddeii; 
modification exhibited by the brain in the whole series 
of vertebrated animals — it is the greatest leap anywhere 
made by N^ature in her brain work. For the two halves 
of the brain being once thus knit together, the progress 
of cerebral complexity is traceable through a complete 
series of steps from the lowest Rodent, or Insectivore, to 
Man ; and that complexity consists, chiefly, in the dis- 
proportionate development of the cerebral hemispheres 
and of the cerebellum, but especially of the former, in 
respect to the other parts of the brain. 

In the lower placental mammals, the cerebral hemi- 
spheres leave the proper upper and posterior face of the^ 
cerebellum completely visible, when the brain is viewed 
from above ; but, in the higher forms, the hinder part of 
each hemisphere, separated only by the tentorium (p, 
136) from the anterior face of the cerebellum, inclines 
backwards and downwards, and grows out, as the so- 
called " posterior lobe," so as at length to overlap and 
hide the cerebellum. In all Mammals, each cerebral 
hemisphere contains a cavity which is termed the " ven- 
tricle " ; and as this ventricle is prolonged, on the one 
hand, for^vards, and on the other downwards, into the 
substance of the hemisphere, it is said to have two horns 
or " cornua," an " anterior cornu,'' and a " descending 
cornu." When the posterior lobe is well developed, a 
third prolongation of the ventricular cavity extends into 
itj and is called the '' posterior cornu." 



116 MaM'S place in NATUfti^. 

In the lower and smaller forms of placental Mammals 
the surface of the cerebral hemispheres is either smooth 
or evenly rounded, or exhibits a very few grooves, which 
are technically termed '' sulci," separating ridges or 
^' convolutions " of the substance of the brain ; and the 
smaller species of all orders tend to a similar smoothness 
of brain. But, in the higher orders, and especially the 
larger members of these orders, the grooves, or sulci, 
become extremely numerous, and the intermediate con- 
volutions proportionately more complicated in their 
meanderings, until, in the Elephant, the Porpoise, the 
higher Apes, and Man, the cerebral surface appears a 
perfect labyrinth of tortuous foldings. 

Where a posterior lobe exists and presents its custom- 
ary cavity — the posterior cornu — it commonly happens 
that a particular sulcus appears upon the inner and 
under surface of the lobe, parallel with and beneath the 
floor of the cornu — which is, as it were, arched over the 
roof of the sulcus. It is as if the groove had been formed 
by indenting the floor of the posterior horn from without 
with a blunt instrument, so that the floor should rise as a 
convex eminence. 'Now this eminence is what has been 
termed the " Hippocampus minor ;" the ^' Hippocampus 
major " being a larger eminence in the floor of the 
descending cornu. What may be the functional impor- 
tance of either of these structures w^e know not. 

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the im- 
possibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man 
and the apes, ]N"ature has provided us, in the latter ani- 
mals, with an almost complete series of gradations froni 
brains little higher than that of a Eodent, to brains little 
lower than that of Man. And it is a remarkable circum- 
stance, that though so far as our present knowledge ex- 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. HY 

tends, there is one true structural break in the series of 
forms of Simian brains, this hiatus does not lie between 
Man and the man-like apes, but between the lower and 
the lowest Simians ; or, in other words, between the old 
and new world apes and monkeys, and the Lemurs. 
Every Lemur which has yet been examined, in fact, has 
ite cerebellum partially visible from above, and its pos- 
terior lobe, with the contained posterior cornu and hip- 
pocampus minor, more or less rudimentary. Every 
Marmoset, American monkey, old world monkey. 
Baboon, or Man-like ape, on the contrary, has its cere- 
bellum entirely hidden, posteriorly, by the cerebral lobes, 
and possesses a large posterior cornu, with a wek- 
developed hippocampus minor. 

In many of these creatures, such as the Saimiri 
(Chrysothrix) , the cerebral lobes overlap and extend 
much further behind the cerebellum, in proportion, than 
they do in man (Fig. 17) — and it is quite certain that, 
in all, the cerebellum is completely covered behind, by 
well developed posterior lobes. The fact can be verified 
by every one who possesses the skull of any old or new 
world monkey. For, inasmuch as the brain in all mam- 
mals completely fills the cranial cavity, it is obvious that 
a cast of the interior of the skull will reproduce the gen- 
eral form of the brain, at any rate with such minute 
and, for the present purpose, utterly unimportant differ- 
ences as may result from the absence of the enveloping 
membranes of the brain in the dry skull. But if such a 
cast be made in plaster, and compared with a similar cast 
of the interior of a human skull, it will be obvious that 
the cast of the cerebral chamber, representing the cere- 
brum of the ape, as completely covers over and overlaps 
the cast of the cerebellar chamber, representing the cere- 
bellum, as it does in the man (Fig. 21). A careless 



lis 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 




UTnmctTisee, 



Fig. 21. — Drawings of the internal casts of a Man's and of a 
Chimpanzee's skull, of the same absolute length, and placed in 
corresponding positions, A. Cerebrum; B. Cerebellum. The for- 
mer drawing is taken from a cast in the Museum of the Royal 
College of Surgeons, the latter from the photograph of the cast 
of a Chimpanzee's skull, which illustrates the paper by Mr. Mar- 
shall " On the Brain of the Chimpanzee " in the Natural His- 
tory Review for July, 1861. The sharper definition of the 
lower edge of the cast of the cerebral chamber in the Chim- 
panzee arises from the circumstance that the tentorium re- 
mained in that skull and not in the Man's, The cast more 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 119 

accurately represents the brain in the Chimpanzee than in the 
Man; and the great backward projection of the posterior lobes 
of the cerebrum of the former, beyond the cerebellum, is con- 
spicuous. 

observer, forgetting that a soft structure like the brain 
loses its proper shape the moment it is taken out of the 
skull, may indeed mistake the uncovered condition of the 
cerebellum of an extracted and distorted brain for the 
natural relations of the parts ; but his error must become 
patent even to himself if he try to replace the brain 
within the cranial chamber. To suppose that the cere- 
bellum of an ape is naturally uncovered behind is a 
miscomprehension comparable only to that of one who 
should imagine that a man's lungs always occupy but a 
small portion of the thoracic cavity, because they do so 
when the chest is opened, and their elasticity is no 
longer neutralized by the pressure of the air. 

And the error is the less excusable, as it must become 
apparent to every one who examines a section of the skull 
of any ape above a Lemur, without taking the trouble 
to make a cast of it. For there is a very marked groove 
in every such skull, as in the human skull — which indi- 
cates the line of attachment of what is termed the ten- 
torium — a sort of parchment-like shelf, or partition, 
which, in the recent state, is interposed between the 
I cerebrum and cerebellum, and prevents the former from 
pressing upon the latter. (See Fig. 17). 

This groove, therefore, indicates the line of separa- 
tion between that part of the cranial cavity which con- 
tains the cerebrum, and that which contains the cerebel- 
lum ; and as the brain exactly fills the cavity of the skull, 
it is obvious that the relations of these two parts of the 
cranial cavity at once informs us of the relations of their 
contents. ISTow in man, in all the old world, and in all 
the new world Simise, with one exception, when the face 



120 MAN^S tLACE IN NAtURE. 

is directed forwards, this line of attachment of the teil- 
toriiim, or impression for the lateral sinus, as it is 
technically called, is nearly horizontal, and the cerebral 
chamber invariably overlaps or projects behind the cere- 
bellar chamber. In the Howler Monkey or Mycetes (see 
Fig. 17), the line passes obliquely upwards and back- 
wards, and the cerebral overlap is almost nil ; while in 
the Lemurs, as in the lower mammals, the line is much 
more inclined in the same direction, and the cerebellar 
chamber projects considerably beyond the cerebral. 

When the graA^est errors respecting points so easily 
settled as this question respecting the posterior lobes, 
can be authoritatively propounded, it is no wonder that 
matters of observation, of no very complex character, but 
still requiring a certain amount of care, should have 
fared worse. Any one who cannot see the posterior lobe 
in an ape's brain is not likely to give a very valuable 
opinion respecting the posterior cornu or the hippocam- 
pus minor. If a man cannot see a church, it is prepos- 
terous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted 
window — so that I do not feel bound to enter upon any 
discussion of these points, but content myself with assur- 
ing the reader that the posterior cornu and the hippo- 
campus minor, have now been seen — usually, at least as 
well developed as in man, and often better — not only in 
the Chimpanzee, the Orang, and the Gibbon, but in all 
the genera of the old world baboons and monkeys, and in 
most of the new world forms, including the Marmosets. 

In fact, all the abundant and trustworthy evidence 
(consisting of the results of careful investigations 
directed to the determination of these very questions, by 
skilled anatomists) which we now possess, leads to the 
conviction that, so far from the posterior lobe, the pos- 
terior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being struc- 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 121 

tures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have 
been over and over again asserted to be, even after the 
publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, 
it is precisely these structures which are the most marked 
cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They 
are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which 
the human organism exhibits. 

As to the convolutions, the brains of the apes exhibit 
every stage of progress, from the almost smooth brain of 
the Marmoset, to the Orang and the Chimpanzee, which 
fall but little below Man. And it is most remarkable 
that, as soon as all the principal sulci appear, the pattern 
according to which they are arranged is identical with 
that of the corresponding sulci of man. The surface of 
the brain of a monkey exhibits a sort of skeleton map of 
man's, and in the man-like apes the details become more 
and more filled in, until it is only in minor characters, 
such as the greater excavation of the anterior lobes, the 
constant presence of fissures usually absent in man, and 
the different disposition and proportions of some con- 
volutions, that the Chimpanzee's or the Orang's brain 
can be structurally distinguished from Man's. 

So far as cerebral structure goes^ therefore, it is clear 
that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, 
than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the dif- 
ference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of 
Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that 
between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur. 

It must not be overlooked, however, that there is a 
very striking difference in absolute mass and weight be- 
tween the lowest human brain and that of the highest 
ape — a difference which is all the more remarkable when 
we recollect that a full-grown Gorilla is probably pretty 
nearly twice as heavy as a Bosjesman, or as many an 



122 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 




Chimpanzee. 



Fig. 22. — Drawing of the cerebral hemispheres of a Man/ 
and of a Chimpanzee of the same length, in order to show the 
relative proportions of the parts: the former taken from a 
specimen, which Mr. Flower, Conservator of the Museum of 
the Royal College of Surgeons, was good enough to dissect for 
me; the latter, from the photograph of a similarly dissected. 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 123 

Chimpanzee s brain, given in Mr. Marshall's paper above re- 
ferred to, a, posterior lobe; h, lateral ventricle; c, posterior 
cornu; x, the hippocampus minor. 

European woman. It may be doubted whether a healthy 
human adult brain ever w^eighed less than thirty-one or 
two ounces, or that the heaviest Gorilla brain has ex- 
ceeded twenty ounces. 

This is a very noteworthy circumstance, and doubtless 
will one day help to furnish an explanation of the great 
gulf which intervenes between the lowest man and the 
highest ape in intellectual power ;''^ but it has little sys- 

*I say help to furnish: for I by no means believe that it 
was any original difference of cerebral quality, or quantity, 
which caused that divergence between the human and the 
pithecoid stripes, which has ended in the present enormous 
gulf between them. It is no doubt perfectly true, in a certain 
sense, that all difference of function is a result of difference of 
structure or, in other words, of difference in the combination of 
the primary molecular forces of living substance and, starting 
from this undeniable axiom, objectors occasionally, and with 
much seeming plausibility, argue that the vast intellectual 
chasm between the Ape and Man implies a corresponding 
structural chasm in the organs of the intellectual functions; 
so that, it is said, the non-discovery of such vast differences 
proves, not that they are absent, but that Science is incompe- 
tent to detect them. A very little consideration, however, will, 
I think, show the fallacy of this reasoning. Its validity hangs 
upon the assumption, that intellectual power depends alto- 
gether on the brain — whereas the brain is only one condition 
out of many on which intellectual manifestations depend; the 
others being, chiefly, the organs of the senses and the motor 
apparatuses, especially those which are concerned in apprehen- 
sion and in the production of articulate speech. 

^ man born dumb, notwithstanding his great cerebral mass 
and his inheritance of strong intellectual instincts, would be 
capable of few higher intellectual manifestations than an 
Orang or a Chimpanzee, if he were confined to the society of 
dumb associates. And yet there might not be the slightest 
discernible difference between his brain and that of a highly 
intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be 
the result of a defective innervation of these parts; or it might 
result from congenital deafness, caused by some minute defect 
of the internal ear, which only a careful anatomist could dis- 
cover. 

The argument, that because there is an immense difference 



12i MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

tematic value, for the simple reason that, as Biay be con- 
cluded from what has been already said respecting cran- 
ial capacity, the difference in weight of brain between 
the highest and the lowest men is far greater, both rela- 
tively and absolutely, than that between the lowest man 
and the highest ape. The latter, as has been seen, is 
represented by, say twelve, ounces of cerebral substance 
absolutely or by 32 :20 relatively ; but as the largest 
recorded human brain weighed between 65 and 66 
ounces, the former difference is represented by more 
than 33 ounces absolutely, or by 65 : 32 relatively. Re- 
garded systematically, the cerebral differences of man 
and apes, are not of more than generic value; his 
Family distinction resting chiefly on his dentition, his 
pelvis, and his lower limbs. 

Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the com- 
parison of their modifications in the ape series leads to 
one and the same result — that the structural differences 
which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpan- 
zee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla 
from the lower apes. 

between a Man's intelligence and an Ape's, therefore, there 
must be an equally immense difference between their brains, 
appears to me to be about as well based as the reasoning by 
which one should endeavour to prove that, because there is a 
" great gulf " between a watch that keeps accurate time and 
another that will not go at all, there is therefore a great 
structural hiatus between the two watches. A hair in the 
balance-wheel, a little rust on a pinion, a bend in a tooth of 
the escapement, a something so slight that only the practised 
eye of the watchmaker can discover it, may be the source of all 
the difference. 

And believing, as I do, with Cuvier, that the possession of 
articulate speech is the grand distinctive character of man 
(whether it be absolutely peculiar to him or not), I find it very 
easy to comprehend, that some equally inconspicuous struc- 
tural difference may have been the primary cause of the im- 
measurable and practically infinite divergence of the Humaii 
from the Simian Stirps, 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 1^5 

But in enunciating this important truth I must guard 
myself against a form of misunderstanding, which is 
very prevalent. I find, in fact, that those v\^ho endeavour 
to teach what nature so clearly shows us in this matter, 
are liable to have their opinions misrepresented and their 
phraseology garbled, until they seem to say that the 
structural differences between man and even the highest 
apes are small and insignificant. Let me take this op- 
portunity then of distinctly asserting, on the contrary, 
that they are great and significant ; that every bone of a 
Gorilla bears marks by which it might be distinguished 
from the corresponding bone of a Man ; and that, in the 
present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link 
bridges over the gap between Homo and Troglodytes. 

It would be no less wrong than absurd to deny the 
existence of this chasm ; but it is at least equally wrong 
and absurd to exaggerate its magnitude and, resting on 
the admitted fact of its existence, to refuse to inquire 
whether it is wide or narrow. Remember, if you will, 
that there is no existing link between Man and the Gor- 
illa, but do not forget that there is a no less sharp line of 
demarcation, a no less complete absence of any transi- 
tional form, between the Gorilla and the Orang, or the 
Orang and the Gibbon. I say, not less sharp, though it 
is somewhat narrower. The structural differences be- 
tween Man and the Manlike apes certainly justify our 
regarding him as constituting a family apart from them ; 
though, inasmuch as he differs less from them than they 
do from other families of the same order, there can be no 
justification for placing him in a distinct order. 

And thus the sagacious foresight of the great lawgiver 
of systematic zoology, Linngeus, becomes justified, and a 
century of anatomical research brings us back to his 
conclusion, that man is a member of the samcvorder (for 



126 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

which the Linnsean term Prim ates ought to be retained) 
as the Apes and Lemurs. This order is now divisible 
into seven f amilies^ of about equal systematic value : the 
first, the Anthkopiis^i^ contains Man alone ; the second, 
the Catakhini^ embraces the old world apes ; the third, 
the Platyrhini^ all new world ajDes, except the Mar- 
mosets; the fourth, the Arctopitiiecini^ contains the 
Marmosets ; the fifth, the Lemurini^ the Lemurs — from 
which Cheiromys should probably be excluded to form a 
sixth distinct family, the Cheiromyixi ; while the sev- 
enth, the Galeopithecixi^ contains only the flying 
Lemur Galeopithecus, — a strange form which ahnost 
touches on the Bats, as the Cheiromys puts on a Kodent 
clothing, and the Lemurs simulate Insectivora. 

Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so 
extraordinary a series of gradations as this — leading us 
insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal 
creation down to creatures, from which there is but a 
step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intel- 
ligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature her- 
self had foreseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman 
severity had provided that his intellect, by its very 
triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, ad- 
monishing the conqueror that he is but dust. 

These are the chief facts, this the immediate con- 
clusion from them to which I adverted in the commence- 
ment of this Essay. The facts, I believe, cannot be dis- 
puted; and if so, the conclusion appears to me to be 
inevitable. 

But if Man be separated by no greater structural bar- 
rier from the brutes than they are from one another — 
then it seems to follow that if any process of physical 
causation can be discovered by which the genera and 
families of ordinary animals have been produced, that 



MAN AND THE LOVv'ER ANIMALS. 127 

process of causation is amply sufficient to account for 
the origin of ]\Ian. In other Vv'ords, if it could be shown 
that the Marmosets, for examjDle, have arisen by gradual 
modification of the ordinary Platjrhini, or that both 
Marmosets and Platyrhini are modified ramifications of 
a primitive stock — then, there would be no rational 
ground for doubting that man might have originated, in 
the one case, bj the gradual modification of a man-like 
ape ; or, in the other case, as a ramification of the same 
primitive stock as those apes. 

At the present moment, but one such process of phy- 
sical causation has any evidence in its favour; or, in 
other w^ords, there is but one hypothesis regarding the 
origin of species of animals in general which has any 
scientific existence — that propounded by Mr. Darwin. 
For Lamarck, sagacious as many of his views were, 
mingled them with so much that was crude and even 
absurd, as to neutralize the benefit which his originality 
might have effected, had he been a more sober and cau- 
tious thinker ; and though I have heard of the announce- 
ment of a formula touching " the ordained continuous 
becoming of organic forms," it is obvious that it is the 
first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible, and that a 
qua-qua-versal proposition of this kind, which may be 
read backwards, or forwards, or sideways, with exactly 
the same amount of signification, does not really exist 
though it may seem to do so. 

At the present moment, therefore, the question of the 
relation of man to the lower animals resolves itself, in 
the end, into the larger question of the ten ability, or 
untenability, of Mr. Darwin's views. But here we enter 
upon difficult ground, and it behoves us to define our 
exact position with the greatest care. 
' It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr, Darwin has 



128 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or 
selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in 
nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such 
selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, struc- 
turally, as some genera even are. If the animated world 
presented us with none but structural differences, I 
should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin had 
demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, 
amply competent to account for the origin of living 
species, and of man among the rest. 

But, in addition to their structural distinctions, the 
species of animals and plants, or at least a great number 
of them, exhibit physiological characters — what are 
known as distinct species, structurally, being for the 
most part either altogether incompetent to breed one with 
another ; or if they breed, the resulting mule, or hybrid, 
is unable to perpetuate its race with another hybrid of 
the same kind. 

A true physical cause is, however, admitted to be such 
only on one condition — that it shall account for all the 
phenomena which come within the range of its opera- 
tion. If it is inconsistent with any one phenomenon, it 
must be rejected ; if it fails to explain any one phenome- 
non, it is so far weak, so far to be suspected ; though it 
may have a perfect right to claim provisional acceptance. 

I^ow, Mr. Darwin's hypothesis is not, so far as I am 
aware, inconsistent with any known biological fact; on 
the contrary, if admitted, the facts of Development, of 
Comparative Anatomy, of Geographical Distribution, 
and of Palaeontology, become connected together, and 
exhibit a meaning such as they never possessed before ; ^ 
and I, for one, am fully convinced, that if not precisely 
true, that hypothesis is as near an approximation to the 
truth as, for example, the Copernican hypothesis was to 
the true theory of the planetary motions. 



Man ANt) THE LOWER ANIMALS. l29 

But, for all this, our acceptance of the Darwinian 
hypothesis must be provisional so long as one link in the 
chain of evidence is wanting ; and so long as all the ani- 
mals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding 
from a common stock are fertile, and their progeny are 
fertile with one another, that link will be wanting. For, 
so long, selective breeding will not be proved to be com- 
petent to do all that is required of it to produce natural 
species. 

I have put this conclusion as strongly as possible 
before the reader, because the last position in which I 
wish to find myself is that of an advocate for Mr. Dar- 
win's, or any other views ; if by an advocate is meant 
one whose business it is to smooth over real difficulties, 
and to persuade where he cannot convince. 

In justice to Mr. Darwin, however, it must be ad- 
mitted that the conditions of fertility and sterility are 
very ill understood, and that every day's advance in 
knowledge leads us to regard the hiatus in his evidence 
as of less and less importance, when set against the mul- 
titude of facts which harmonize with, or receive an ex- 
planation from, his doctrines. 

I adopt Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, therefore, sub- 
ject to the production of proof that physiological species 
may be produced by selective breeding; just as a physical 
philosopher may accept the undulatory theory of light, 
subject to the proof of the existence of the hypothetical 
ether; or as the chemist adopts the atomic theory, subject 
to the proof of the existence of atoms ; and for exactly 
the same reasons, namely, that it has an immense amount 
of prima facie probability: that it is the only means at 
present within reach of reducing the chaos of observed 
facts to order ; and lastly, that it is the most powerful 
instrument of investigation which has been presented to 
9 



130 MAN'S PLACE IN NATUI^E. 

naturalists since the invention of the natural system oi 
classification, and the commencement of the systematic 
study of embryology. 

But even leaving Mr» Darwin's views aside, the whole 
analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and 
crushing an argument against the intervention of any 
but what are termed secondary causes, in the production 
of all the phenomena of the universe, that, in view of the 
intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living 
world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and 
all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all 
are co-ordinated terms of N^ature's great progression, 
from the formless to the formed — from the inorganic to 
the organic — from blind force to conscious intellect and 
will. 

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascer- 
tained and enunciated truth ; and were these pages ad- 
dressed to men of science only, I should now close this 
Essay, knowing that my colleagues have learned to re- 
spect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their 
highest duty lies in submitting to it, however it may jar 
against their inclinations. 

But, desiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the 
intelligent public, it would be unworthy cowardice were 
I to ignore the repugnance with which the majority of 
my readers are likely to meet the conclusions to which 
the most careful and conscientious study I have been 
able to give to this matter, has led me. 

On all sides I shall hear the cry — " We are men and 
women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in 
the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain 
than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas. The power 
of knowledge — the conscience of good and evil — the piti- 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 13l 

ful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all 
real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may 
seem to approximate us." 

To this I can only reply that the exclamation would 
be most just and would have my own entire sympathy, if 
it were only relevant. But, it is not I who seek to base 
Man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we 
are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the 
contrary, I have done my best to sw^eep away this vanity. 
I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural 
line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals 
which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be draw^n 
between the animal world and ourselves ; and I may add 
the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a 
psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the 
highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to 
germinate in lower forms of life. " At the same time, no 
one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness 
of the gulf between civilised man and the brutes ; or is 

* It is so rare a pleasure for me to find Professor Owen's 
opinions in entire accordance with my own, that I cannot for- 
bear from quoting a paragraph which appeared in his Essay 
" On the Characters, &c., of the Class Mammalia," in the Jour- 
nal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London for 
1857, but is unaccountably omitted in the " Reade Lecture " 
delivered before the University of Cambridge two years later, 
which is otherwise nearly a reprint of the paper in question. 
Prof. Owen writes: 

" Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction 
between the psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee and of a 
Boschisman or of an Aztec, with arrested brain growth, as be- 
ing of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison be- 
tween them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I 
cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading 
similitude of structure — every tooth, every bone, strictly homo- 
logus — which makes the determination of the difference be- 
tween Homo and Pithecus the anatomist's difficulty." 

Surely it is a little singular, that the "anatomist," who 
finds it " difficult " to determine " the difference " between 
Homo and Pithecus, should yet range them on anatomical 
grounds, in distinct sub-classes. 



132 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

more certain that whether fro7n them or not, he is as- 
suredly not of them, i^o one is less disposed to think 
lightly of the present dignity, or despairingly of the 
future hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen 
of this world. 

We are indeed told by those wdio assume authority in 
these matters, that the two sets of opinions are incom- 
patible, and that the belief in the unity of origin of man 
and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of 
the former. But is this really so ? Could not a sensible 
child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetori- 
cians who would force this conclusion upon us ? Is it, 
indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the 
Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded 
from his high estate by the undoubted historical probabi- 
lity, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant 
of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was 
just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than 
the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger ? 
Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of 
the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an eggy 
which no ordinary power of discrimination could distin- 
guish from that of a Dog ? Or is the philanthropist, or 
the saint, to give up his endeavours to lead a' noble life, 
because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its 
foundations, all the selfish passions, and fierce appetites 
of the merest quadruped ? Is mother-love vile because a 
hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it ? 

The common sense of the mass of mankind will an- 
swer these questions without a moment's hesitation. 
Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to. escape 
from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding 
over speculative pollution to the cynics and the '^right- 
eous overmuch " who, disagreeing in evel'ything elsCj 



MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS. 133 

unite in blind insensibility to tlie nobleness of the visible 
world, and in inability to appreciate the grandeur of 
the place Man occupies therein. 

^ay more, thoughtful men, once escaped from the 
blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in 
the lowly stock whence Man has sprung, the best evi- 
dence of the splendour of his capacities ; and will discern 
in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable 
ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler Future. 

They will remember that in comparing civilised man 
with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who 
sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly 
discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks 
end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the 
awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses 
to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious 
masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, 
or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces — of one sub- 
stance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces 
to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. 

But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his 
teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our 
wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to 
the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder. 

And after passion and prejudice have died away, the 
same result will attend the teachings of the naturalist 
respecting that great Alps and Andes of the living world 
— Man. Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will 
not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in sub- 
stance and in structure, one with the brutes ; for, he 
alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible 
and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of 
his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organised 
the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessa- 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



tion of every individual life in other animals; so that, 
now, lie stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far 
above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured 
from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a 
ray from the infinite source of truth. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 135 



III. 
OX SOME FOSSIL KEMAIA^S OF MAK 

I HAVE endeavoured to show, in the preceding Essay, 
that the Axtiiropi^'i, or Man Family, form a very well- 
defined group of the Primates, between which and the 
immediately following Family, the Catakhini^ there is, 
in the existing world, the same entire absence of any 
transitional form or connecting link, as between the 
Catarhini and Platyrhixi. 

It is a commonly received doctrine, however, that the 
structural intervals between the various existing modifi- 
cations of organic beings may be diminished, or even 
obliterated, if we take into account the long and varied 
succession of animals and plants which have preceded 
these now living and which are known to us only by their 
fossilized remains. How far this doctrine is well based, 
how far, on the other hand, as our knowledge at present 
stands, it is an overstatement of the real facts of the 
case, and an exaggeration of the conclusions fairly de- 
ducible from them, are points of grave importance, but 
into the discussion of which I do not, at present, propose 
to enter. It is enough that such a view of the relations 
of extinct to living beings has been propounded, to lead 
us to inquire, with anxiety, how far the recent discov- 
eries of human remains in a fossil state bear out, or 
oppose, that view. 



120 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

I shall confine myself, in discussing this question, to 
those fragmentary Human skulls from the caves of 
Engis in the valley of the Meuse, in Belgium, and of 
the ^Neanderthal, near Diisseldorf, the geological re- 
lations of which have been examined with so much care 
by Sir Charles Lyell ; upon whose high authority I shall 
take it for granted, that the Engis skull belonged to a ■ 
contemporary of the Mammoth {Eleplias priniigenhis) 
and of the woolly Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros tichorhinus), 
with the bones of which it was found associated ; and 
that the Neanderthal skull is of great, though uncertain, 
antiquity. Whatever be the geological age of the latter 
skull, I conceive it is quite safe (on the ordinary prin- 
ciples of paleontological reasoning) to assume that the 
former takes us to, at least, the further side of the vague 
biological limit, which separates the present geological 
epoch from that which immediately preceded it. And 
there can be no doubt that the physical geography of 
Europe has changed wonderfully, since the bones of 
Men and Mammoths, Hyaenas and Rhinoceroses were 
washed pell-mell into the cave of Engis. 

The skull from the cave of Engis was originally dis- 
covered by Professor Schmerling, and was described by 
him, together with other human remains disinterred at 
the same time, in his valuable work, " Recherches sur 
les Ossemens fossiles decouverts dans les Cavernes cle 
la Province de Liege," published in 1833 (p. 59, et 
seq.), from which the following paragraphs are ex- 
tracted, the precise expressions of the author being, as 
fas as possible preserved. 

" In the first place, I must remark that these human re- 
mains, whicli are in my possession, are characterised, lil^e the 
thousands of bones which I have lately been disinterring, by 
the extent of the decomposition which they have undergone, 
which is precisely the same as that of the extinct species; all. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 



137 



with a few exceptions, are broken; some few are rounded, as is 
frequently found to be the case in fossil remains of other 
species. The fractures are vertical or oblique; none of them 
are eroded; their colour does not differ from that of other 
fossil bones, and varies from whitish yellow to blackish. All 
are lighter than recent bones, with the exception of those 
which have a calcareous incrustation, and the cavities of 
which are filled with such matter. 

" The cranium v^hich I have caused to be figured, Plate I, 
figs. 1, 2, is that of an old person. The sutures are beginning 
to be effaced: all the facial bones are wanting, and of the 




Fig. 23. — The skull from the cave of Engis — viewed from 
the right side. One half the size of nature, a glabella, & oc- 
cipital protuberance (a to & glabello-occipital line), c auditory 
foramen. 



temporal bones only a fragment of that of the right side is 
preserved. 

" The face and the base of the cranium had been detached 
before the skull was deposited in the cave, for we were un- 
able to find those parts, though the whole cavern Y/as regularly 
searched. The cranium v/as met with at a depth of a metre 
and a half [five feet nearly] hidden under an osseous breccia, 
composed of the remains of small animals, and containing 
one rhinoceros' tusk, v/ith several teeth of horses and of 
^iimmants. This breccia, which has been spoken of above 



138 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

(p. 31), was a metre [3^4 feet about] wide, and rose to the 
height of a metre and a half above the floor of the cavern, to 
the walls of which it adhered strongly. 

" The earth which contained this human skull exhibited 
no trace of disturbance: teeth of rhinoceros, horse, hyaena, 
and bear, surrounded it on all sides. 

" The famous Blumenbach * has directed attention to the 
differences presented by the form and the dimensions of 
human crania of different races. This important work would 
have assisted us greatly, if the face, a part essential for the 
determination of race, with more or less accuracy, had not 
been wanting in our fossil cranium. 

" We are convinced that even if the skull had been com- 
plete, it would not have been possible to pronounce, with cer- 
tainty, upon a single specimen; for individual variations are 
so numerous in the crania of one and the same race, that one 
cannot, without laying one's self open to large chances of 
error, draw any inference from a single fragment of a cra- 
nium to the general form of the head to which it belonged. 

" Nevertheless in order to neglect no point respecting the 
form of this fossil skull, we may observe that, from the first, 
the elongated and narrow form of the forehead attracted our 
attention. 

" In fact, the slight elevation of the frontal, its narrowness, 
and the form of the orbit, approximate it more nearly to the 
cranium of an Ethiopian than to that of an European; the 
elongated form and the produced occiput are also characters 
which we believe to be observable in our fossil cranium; but 
to remove all doubt upon that subject I have caused the con- 
tours of the cranium of an European and of an Ethiopian to 
be drawn and the foreheads represented. Plate II, Figs. 1 and 
2, and, in the same plate. Pigs. 3 and 4, will render the dif- 
ferences easily distinguishable; and a single glance at the 
figures will be more instructive than a long and wearisome 
description. 

" At whatever conclusion we may arrive as to the origin 
of the man from whence this fossil skull proceeded, we may 
express an opinion without exposing ourselves to a fruitless 
controversy. Each may adopt the hypothesis which seems 
to him most probable: for my own part, I hold it to be demon- 
strated that this cranium has belonged to a person of limited 
intellectual faculties, and we conclude thence that it belonged 
to a man of a low degree of civilization: a deduction which is 
borne out by contrasting the capacity of the frontal with 
that of the occipital region. 

" Another cranium of a young individual was discovered' 
fn the floor of the cavern beside the tooth of an elephant; the 
skull was entire when found, but the moment it was lifted it 

* Decas CoUectionis sum craniorum diversarum gentium 
mustrata,--Goiting3s, 1790-1820, 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF 3IAN. ie9 

fell into pieces, which I have not, as yet, been able to put 
together again. But I have represented the bones of the upper 
jaw, Plate I, Fig. 5. The state of the alveoli and the teeth 
shows that the molars had not yet pierced the gum. De- 
tached milk molars and some fragments of a human skull, 
proceed from this same place. The figure 3 represents a hu- 
man superior incisor tooth, the size of which is truly re- 
lambdoidal suture. 

" Figure 4 is a fragment of a superior maxillary bone, the 
molar teeth of which are worn down to the roots. 

" I possess two vertebrae, a first and last dorsal. 

" A clavicle of the left side (see Plate III, Fig. 1) ; although 
it belonged to a young individual, this bone shows that he 
must have been of great stature. t 

" Two fragments of the radius, badly preserved, do not in- 
dicate that the height of the man, to whom they belonged, 
exceeded five feet and a half. 

" As to the remains of the upper extremities, those which 
are in my possession consist merely of a fragment of an ulna 
and of a radius (Plate III, Figs. 5 and 6). 

" Figure 2, Plate IV, represents a metacarpal bone, contained 
in the breccia, of which we have spoken; it was found in the 
lower part above the cranium: add to this some metacarpal 
bones, found at very different distances, half-a-dozen meta- 
tarsals, three phalanges of the hand, and one of the foot. 

" This is a brief enumeration of the remains of human 
bones collected in the cavern of Engis, which has preserved 
for us the remains of three individuals, surrounded by those 
of the Elephant, of the Rhinoceros, and of Carnivora of species 
unknown in the present creation." 



From the cave of Engihoiil, opposite that of Engis, 
on the right bank of the Mense, Schmerling obtained 
the remains of three other individnals of Man, among 
which were only two fragments of parietal bones, but 
many bones of the extremities. In one case, a broken 
fragment of an ulna was soldered to a like fragment of 
a radius of stalagmite, a condition frequently observed 

* In a subsequent passage, Schmerling remarks upon the 
occurrence of an incisor tooth " of enormous size " from the 
caverns of Engihoul. The tooth figured is somewhat long, 
but its dimensions do not appear to me to be otherwise re- 
markable. 

t The figure of this clavicle measures 5 inches from end to 
end in a straight line — so that the bone is rather a small than 
a large one. 



14:0 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

among the bones of the Cave Bear (Ursiis spelceus), 
found in the Belgian caverns. 

It was in the cavern of Engis that Professor Schmer- 
ling found, incrusted with stalagmite and joined to a 
stone, the pointed bone implement, which he has figured 
in Fig. 7 of his Plate XXXVI, and worked flints were 
found by him in all those Belgian caves, which con- 
tained an abimdance of fossil bones. 

A short letter from M. Geoffrey St. Hilaire, pub- 
lished in the " Comptes Eendus " of the Academy of 
Sciences of Paris, for July 2nd, 1838, speaks of a visit 
(and apparently a very hasty one) paid to the collection 
of Professor " Schermidt " (which is presumably a 
misprint for Schmerling) at Liege. The writer briefly 
criticises the drawings which illustrate Schmerling's 
work, and affirms that the " human cranium is a little 
longer than it is represented " in Schmerling's figure. 
The only other remark worth quoting is this: — 

"*Tlie aspect of the human bones differs little from that 
of thescave bones, with which we are familiar, and of which 
there is a considerable collection in the same place. With 
respect to their special forms, compared with those of the 
varieties of recent human crania, few certain conclusions can 
be put forward; for much greater differences exist between 
the different specimens of well-characterized varieties, than 
between the fossil cranium of Liege and that of one of those 
varieties selected as a term of comparison." 

Geoffrey St. Hilaire's remarks are, it will be ob- 
served, little but an echo of the philosophic doubts of 
the describer and discoverer of the remains. As to the 
critique upon Schmerling's figures, I find that the side, 
view given by the latter is really about ^^ths of an inch 
shorter than the original, and that the front view is 
diminished to about the same extent. Otherwise the 
representation is notj in any way, inaQcurate^ but cor- 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. I4I 

responds very well with the cast which is in my posses- 
sion. 

A piece of the occipital hone, which Schmerling 
seems to have missed, has since been fitted on to the rest 
of the cranium by an accomplished anatomist, Dr. 
Spring of Liege, under whose direction an excellent 
plaster cast was made for Sir Charles Lyell. It is upon 
and from a duplicate of that cast that my own observa- 
tions and the accompanying figures, the outlines of 
which are copied from very accurate Camera lucida 
drawings, by my friend Mr. Busk, reduced to one-half 
of the natural size, are made. 

As Professor Schmerling observes, the base of the 
skull is destroyed, and the facial bones are entirely 
absent; but the roof of the cranium, consisting of the 
frontal, parietal and the greater part of the occipital 
bones, as far as the middle of the occipital foramen, is 
entire, or nearly so. The left temporal bone is Avanting. 
Of the right temporal, the parts in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of the auditory foramen, the mastoid process, 
and a considerable portion of the squamous element of 
the temporal are well preserved (Fig. 23). 

The lines of fracture which remain between the coad- 
justed pieces of the skull, and are faithfully displayed 
in Schmerling's figure, are readily traceable in the cast. 
The sutures are also discernible, but the comj)lex dis- 
position of their serrations, shown in the figure, is not 
obvious in the cast. Though the ridges which give at- 
tachment to muscles are not excessively prominent, they 
are well marked, and taken together with the apparently 
well developed frontal sinuses, and the condition of the 
sutures, leave no doubt on my mind that the skull is 
that of an adult, if not middle-aged man. 

The extreme length of the skull is 7.7 inches. Its 



u^ 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 




Fig 24 — The Engis skull viewed from above (A) and in 
front (5). 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. I43 

extreme breadth, whicli corresponds very nearly with 
the interval between the parietal protuberances, is not 
more than 5.4 inches. The proportion of the length to 
the breadth is therefore very nearly as 100 to 70. If a 
line be drawn from the point at which the brow cnrvos 
in towards the root of the nose, and which is called the 
^^ glabella " (a), (Fig. 23), to the occipital protuber- 
ance (h), and the distance to the highest point of the 
arch of the skull be measured perpendicularly from this 
line, it will be found to be 4.75 inches. Viewed from 
above. Fig. 24, J., the forehead presents an evenly 
rounded curve, and passes into the contour of the sides 
and back of tlae skull, which describes a tolerably regu- 
lar elliptical curve. 

The front view (Fig. 24, B) shows that the roof of 
the skull was very regularly and elegantly arched in the 
transverse direction, and that the transverse diameter 
was a little less below the parietal protuberances, than 
above them. The forehead cannot be called narrow in 
relation to the rest of the skull, nor can it be called a 
retreating forehead; on the contrary, the antero-poster- 
ior contour of the skull is well arched, so that the dis- 
tance along that contour, from the nasal depression to 
the occipital protuberance, measures about 13.75 
inches. The transverse arc of the skull, measured from 
one auditory foramen to the other, across the middle of 
the sagittal suture, is about 13 inches. The sagittal 
suture itself is 5.5 inches long. 

The supraciliary prominences or brow-ridges (on 
each side of a. Fig. 23) are well, but not excessively, 
developed, and are separated by a median depression. 
Their principal elevation is disposed so obliquely that I 
judge them to be due to large frontal sinuses. 

If a line joining the glabella and the occipital pro- 



14:4: MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

tuberance (a, h. Fig. 23) be made horizontal, uo part of 
the occipital region projects more than y\^th of an inch 
behind the posterior extremity of that line, and the 
upper edge of the auditory foramen (c) is almost in 
contact with a line drawn parallel with this upon the 
outer surface of the skull. 

A transverse line drawn from one auditory foramen 
to the other traverses, as usual, the fore part of the occi- 
pital foramen. The capacity of the interior of this 
fragmentary skull has not been ascertained. 

The history of the Human remains from the cavern 
in the E'eanderthal may best be given in the words of 
their original describer, Dr. Schaaffhausen,* as trans- 
lated by Mr. Busk. 

" In the early part of the year 1857, a human skeleton was 
discovered in a limestone cave in the Neanderthal, near Hoch- 
dal, between Dlisseldorf and Elberfeld. Of this, however, I 
was unable to procure more than a plaster cast of the cranium, 
taken at Elberfeld, from which I drew up an account of its 
remarkable conformation, which was, in the first instance, 
read on the 4th of February, 1857, at the meeting of the Lower 
Rhine Medical and Natural History Society, at Bonn.f Subse- 
quently Dr. Fuhlrott, to whom science is indebted for the 
preservation of these bones, which were not at first regarded 
as human, and into whose possession they afterwards came, 
brought the cranium from Elberfeld to Bonn, and entrusted 
it to me for more accurate anatomical examination. At the 
General Meeting of the Natural History Society of Prussian 
Rhineland and Westphalia, at Bonn, on the 2nd of June, 1857,$ 
Dr. Fuhlrott himself gave a full account of the locality, and 
of the circumstances under which the discovery was made. 
He was of opinion that the bones might be regarded as fossil; 

* On the Crania of the most Ancient Races of Man. — By 
Professor D. Schaaffhausen, of Bonn. (From Miiller's Archiv., 
1858, p. 453.) With Remarks, and original Figures, taken 
from a Cast of the Neanderthal Cranium, By George Busk, 
F.R.S., etc. Natural History Review. April, 1861. 

t Verhandl. d. Naturhist. Vereins der preuss. Rheinlande 
und Westphalens., xiv. — Bonn, 1857. 

1 11). Correspondenzblatt, No, 2, 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OP MAN; U5 

and in coming to this conclusion, lie laid especial stress upon 
the existence of dendritic deposits, with which their surface 
was covered, and which were first noticed upon them by Pro- 
fessor Mayer. To this communication I appended a brief re- 
port on the results of my anatomical examination of the bones. 
The conclusions at which I arrived were: 1st. That the ex- 
traordinary form of the skull was due to a natural conforma- 
tion hitherto not known to exist, even in the most barbarous 
races. 2nd. That these remarkable human remains belonged 
to a period antecedent to the time of the Celts and Germans, 
and were in all probability derived from one of the wild races 
of North-western Europe, spoken of by Latin writers; and 
which were encountered as autochthones by the German im- 
migrants. And 3rdly. That it was beyond doubt that these 
human relics were traceable to a period at which the latest 
animals of the diluvium still existed; but that no proof of 
this assumption, nor consequently of their so-termed fossil 
condition, was afforded by the circumstances under which 
the bones were discovered. 

" As Dr. Fuhlrott has not yet published his description of 
these circumstances, I borrow the following account of them 
from one of his letters. ' A small cave or grotto, high enough 
to admit a man, and about 15 feet deep from the entrance, 
which is 7 or 8 feet wide, exists in the southern wall of the 
gorge of the Neanderthal, as it is termed, at a distance of 
about 100 feet from the Diissel, and about 60 feet above the 
bottom of the valley. In its earlier and uninjured condition, 
this cavern opened upon a narrow plateau lying in front of it, 
and from which the rocky wall descended almost perpendicu- 
larly into the river. It could be reached, though with diffi- 
culty, from above. The uneven floor was covered to a thick- 
ness of 4 or 5 feet with a deposit of mud, sparingly intermixed 
with rounded fragments of chert. In the removing of this 
deposit, the bones were discovered. The skull was first no- 
ticed, placed nearest to the entrance of the cavern; and fur- 
ther in, the other bones, lying in the same horizontal plane. 
Of this I was assured, in the most positive terms, by two 
labourers who were employed to clear out the grotto, and who 
were questioned by me on the spot. At first no idea was en- 
tertained of the bones being human; and it was not till several 
weeks after their discovery that they were recognised as such 
by me, and placed in security. 

" ' But, as the importance of the discovery was not at the 
time perceived, the labourers were very careless in the col- 
lecting, and secured chiefly only the larger bones; and to this 
circumstance it may be attributed that fragments merely of 
the probably perfect skeleton came into my possession.' 

" My anatomical examination of these bones afforded the 
following results: — 

" The cranium is of unusual size, and of a long-elliptical 
form. A most remarkable peculiarity is at once obvious ia 
10 



146 MAN'S PLACE m NATtJl^fi. 

the extraordinary development of the frontal sinuses, owing 
to which the superciliary ridges, which coalesce completely 
in the middle, are rendered so prominent, that the frontal 
bone exhibits a considerable hollow or depression above, or 
rather behind them, whilst a deep depression is also formed 
in the situation of the root of the nose. The forehead is nar- 
row and low, though the middle and hinder portions of the 
cranial arch are well developed. Unfortunately, the fragment 
of the skull that has been preserved consists only of the por- 
tion situated above the roof of the orbits and the superior 
occipital ridges, which are greatly developed, and almost con- 
joined so as to form a horizontal eminence. It includes almost 
the whole of the frontal bone, both parietals, a small part of 
the squamous and the upper-third of the occipital. The re- 
cently fractured surfaces show that the skull was broken at 
the time of its disinterment. The cavity holds 16,876 grains 
of water, whence its cubical contents may be estimated at 
57.64 inches, or 1033.24 cubic centimetres. In making this esti- 
mation, the water is supposed to stand on a level with the 
orbital plate of the frontal, with the deepest notch in the 
squamous margin of the parietal, and with the superior semi- 
circular ridges of the occipital. Estimated in dried millet- 
seed, the contents equalled 31 ounces, Prussian Apothecaries' 
weight. The semicircular line indicating the upper boundary 
of the attachment of the temporal muscle, though not very 
strongly marked, ascends nevertheless to more than half the 
height of the parietal bone. On the right superciliary ridge 
is observable an oblique furrow or depression, indicative of 
an injury received during life.* The coronal and sagittal su- 
tures are on the exterior nearly closed, and on the inside so 
completely ossified as to have left no traces whatever, whilst 
the lambdoidal remains quite open. The depressions for the 
Pacchionian glands are deep and numerous; and there is an 
unusually deep vascular groove immediately behind the coro- 
nal suture, which, as it terminates in a foramen, no doubt 
transmitted a vena, emissaria. The course of the frontal su- 
ture is indicated externally by a slight ridge; and where it 
joins the coronal, this ridge rises into a small protuberance. 
The course of the sagittal suture is grooved, and above the 
angle of the occipital bone the parietals are depressed. 

mm.f inches. 

The length of the skull from the 
nasal process of the frontal over 
the vertex to the superior semi- 

* This, Mr. Busk has pointed out, is probably the notch for 
the frontal nerve. 

t The numbers in parentheses are those which I should as- 
sign to the different measures, as taken from the plaster cast. 
— G, B, 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 147 

ram, inches. 
Circular lines of the occipital meas- 
ures 303 (300) = 12.0". 

Circumference over the orbital 
ridges and the superior semicircu- 
lar lines of the occipital 590 (590) = 23.37" or 23". 

Width of the frontal from the mid- 
dle of the temporal line on one 
side to the same point on the oppo- 
posite 104 (114) = 4.1"— 4.5". 

Length of the frontal from the 
nasal process to the coronal su- 
ture 133 (125) = 5.25"— 5". 

Extreme width of the frontal si- 
nuses 25 (23) =1.0"— 0.9". 

Vertical height above a line joining 
the deepest notches in the squa- 
mous border of the parietals 70 = 2.75." 

Width of hinder part of skull from 
one parietal protuberance to the 
other 138 (150) = 5.4"— 5.9". 

Distance from the upper angle of 
the occipital to the superior semi- 
circular lines 51 (60) =1.9"— 2.4". 

Thickness of the bone at the parie- 
tal protuberance 8. 

at the angle of the occipital . . 9. 

at the superior semicircular 

line of the occipital 10 = 0.3". 

" Besides the cranium, the following bones have been se- 
cured: — 

" 1. Both thigh-bones, perfect. These, like the skull, and 
all the other bones, are characterized by their unusual thick- 
ness, and the great development of all the elevations and ds- 
pressions for the attachment of muscles. In the Anatomical 
Museum at Bonn, under the designation of ' Giant's bones,' are 
some recent thigh-bones, with which in thickness the fore- 
going pretty nearly correspond, although they are shorter. 

Giant's bones. Fossil bones, 
mm. inches. mm. inches. 

Length 542 = 21.4" ... 438 = 17.4". 

Diameter of head of femur. . . 54 = 2.14" ... 53= 2.0". 
Diameter of lower articular end, 
from one condyle to the 

other 89 = 3.5" ... 87 = 3.4". 

Diameter of femur in the middle 33 = 1.2" ... 30 = 1.1". 

" 2. A perfect right humerus, whose size shows that it be- 
longs to the thigh-bones. 



148 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

mm. inches. 

Length 312 = 12.3'. 

Thickness in the middle 26 = 1.0". 

Diameter of head 49 == 1.9". 

" Also a perfect right radius of corresponding dimensions 
and the upper-third of a right ulna corresponding to the 
humerus and radius. 

" 3. A left humerus, of which the upper-third is wanting, 
and which is so much slenderer than the right as apparently 
to belong to a distinct individual; a left ulna, which, though 
complete, is pathologically deformed, the coronoid process be- 
ing so much enlarged by bony growth, that flexure of the elbow 
beyond a right angle must have been impossible; the anterior 
fossa of the humerus for the reception of the coronoid process 
being also filled up with a similar bony growth. At the same 
time, the olecranon is curved strongly downwards. As the 
bone presents no sign of rachitic degeneration, it may be sup- 
posed that an injury sustained during life was the cause of 
the anchylosis. When the left ulna is compared with the 
right radius, it might at first sight be concluded that the 
bones respectively belonged to different individuals, the ulna 
being more than half an inch too short for articulation with 
a corresponding radius. But it is clear that this shortening, 
as well as the attenuation of the left humerus, are both con- 
sequent upon the pathological condition above described. 

" 4. A left ilium, almost perfect, and belonging to the 
femur; a fragment of the right scapula: the anterior extremity 
of a rib of the right side; and the same part of a rib of the 
left side; the hinder part of a rib of the right side; and, lastly, 
two hinder portions and one middle portion of ribs which, 
from their unusually rounded shape, and abrupt curvature, 
more resemble the ribs of a carniverous animal than those of 
a man. Dr. H. v. Meyer, however, to whose judgment I defer, 
will not venture to declare them to be ribs of any animal; and 
it only remains to suppose that this abnormal condition has 
arisen from an unusually powerful development of the thoracic 
muscles. 

" The bones adhere strongly to the tongue, although, as 
proved by the use of hydrochloric acid, the greater part of the 
cartilage is still retained in them, which appears, however, to 
have undergone that transformation into gelatine which has 
been observed by v. Bibra in fossil bones. The surface of all 
the bones is in many spots covered with minute black specks, 
which, more especially under a lens, are seen to be formed 
of very delicate dendrites. These deposits, which were first 
observed on the bones by Dr. Mayer, are most distinct on the 
inner surface of the cranial bones. They consist of a ferrugi- 
nous compound, and, from their black colour, may be sup- 
posed to contain manganese. Similar dendritic formations 
^Iso occur, not unfrequently, on laminated rocks, and are 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 149 

usually found in minute fissures and cracks. At the meeting 
of the Lower Rhine Society at Bonn, on the 1st April, 1857, 
Prof. Mayer stated that he had noticed in the museum of Pop- 
pelsdorf similar dendritic crystallizations on several fossil 
bones of animals, and particularly on those of Ursus spelwus, 
but still more abundantly and beautifully displayed on the 
fossil bones and teeth of Equus adamiticus, Elephas privii- 
genius, &c., from the caves of Bolve and Sundwig. Faint 
indications of similar dendrites were visible in a Roman skull 
from Siegburg; whilst other ancient skulls, which had lain 
for centuries in the earth, presented no trace of them.* I am 
indebted to H. v. Meyer for the following remarks on this 
subject: — 

" ' The incipient formation of dendritic deposits, which were 
formerly regarded as a sign of a truly fossil condition, is in- 
teresting. It has even been supposed that in diluvial deposits 
the presence of dendrites might be regarded as affording a 
certain mark of distinction between bones mixed with the 
diluvium at a somewhat later period and the true diluvial 
relics, to which alone it was supposed that these deposits 
were confined. But I have long been convinced that neither 
can the absence of dendrites be regarded as indicative of re- 
cent age, nor their presence as sufficient to establish the great 
antiquity of the objects upon which they occur. I have my- 
self noticed upon paper, which could scarcely be more than a 
year old, dendritic deposits, which could not be distinguished 
from those on fossil bones. Thus I poss'^ss a dog's skull from 
the Roman colony of the neighbouring Heddersheim, Castruw. 
Hadrianum, which is in no v/ay distinguishable from the fos- 
sil bones from the Frankish caves; it presents the same colour, 
and adheres to the tongue just as they do; so that this char- 
acter also, which, at a former meeting of German naturalists 
at Bonn, gave rise to amusing scenes between Buckland and 
Schmerling, is no longer of any value. In disputed cases, 
therefore, the condition of the bone can scarcely afford the 
means for determining with certainty whether it be fossil, 
that is to say, whether it belong to geological antiquity or to 
the historical period.' 

" As we cannot now look upon the primitive world as rep- 
resenting a wholly different condition of things, from which 
no transition exists to the organic life of the present time, the 
designation of fossil, as applied to a "bone, has no longer the 
sense it conveyed in the time of Cuvier. Sufficient grounds 
exist for the assumption that man co-existed with the animals 
found in the diluvium.; and many a barbarous race may, be- 
fore all historical time, have disappeared, together with the 
animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organi- 
zation is improved have continued the genus. The bones which 

* Yerli. des 'Naturhist. Vereins in Bonn, xiv. 1857. 



150 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

form the subject of this paper present characters which, al- 
though not decisive as regards a geological epoch, are, never- 
theless, such as indicate a very high antiquity. It may also 
be remarked that, common as is the occurrence of diluvial 
animal bones in the muddy deposits of caverns, such remains 
have not hitherto been met with in the caves of the Neander- 
thal; and that the bones, which were covered by a deposit of 
mud not more than four or five feet thick, and without any 
protective covering of stalagmite, have retained the greatest 
part of their organic substance. 

" These circumstances might be adduced against the proba- 
bility of a geological antiquity. Nor should we be justified in 
regarding the cranial conformation as perhaps representing 
the most savage primitive type of the human race, since crania 
exist among living savages, which, though not exhibiting such 
a remarkable conformation of the forehead, which gives the 
skull somewhat the aspect of that of the large apes, still in 
other respects, as for instance in the greater depth of the 
temporal fossae, the crest-like, prominent temporal ridges, and 
a generally less capacious cranial cavity, exhibit an equally 
low stage of development. There is no reason for supposing 
that the deep frontal hollow is due to any artificial flattening, 
such as is practised in various modes by barbarous nations 
in the Old and New World. The skull is quite symmetrical, 
and shows no indication of counter-pressure at the occiput, 
whilst, according to Morton, in the Flat-heads of the Colum- 
bia, the frontal and parietal bones are always unsymmetrical. 
Its conformation exhibits the sparing development of the an- 
terior part of the head which has been so often observed in 
very ancient crania, and affords one of the most striking proofs 
of the influence of culture and civilization on the form of the 
human skull." 

In a subsequent passage, Dr. Schaaffhausen remarks : 

" There is no reason whatever for regarding the unusual 
development of the frontal sinuses in the remarkable skull 
from the Neanderthal as an individual or pathological deform- 
ity; it is unquestionably a typical race-character, and is phys- 
iologically connected with the uncommon thickness of the 
other bones of the skeleton, which exceeds by about one-half 
the usual proportions. This expansion of the frontal sinuses, 
which are appendages of the air-passages, also indicates an 
unusual force and power of endurance in the movements .of 
the body, as may be concluded from the size of all the ridges 
and processes for the attachment of the muscles or bones. 
That this conclusion may be drawn from the existence of large 
frontal sinuses, and a prominence of the lower frontal region, 
is confirmed in many ways by other observations. By the 
same characters, according to Pallas, the wild horse is dis- 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 151 

tinguished from the domesticated, and, according to Cuvier, 
the fossil cave-bear from every recent species of bear, whilst, 
according to Roulin, the pig, which has become wild in Amer- 
ica, and regained a resemblance to the wild boar, is thus dis- 
tinguished from the same animal in the domesticated state, 
as is the chamois from the goat; and, lastly, the bull-dog, 
which is characterised by its large bones and strongly-de- 
veloped muscles from every other kind of dog. The estima- 
tion of the facial angle, the determination of which, according 
to Professor Owen, is also difficult in the great apes, owing to 
the very prominent supra-orbital ridges, in the present case is 
rendered still more difficult from the absence both of the 
auditory opening and of the nasal spine. But if the proper 
horizontal position of the skull be taken from the remaining 
portions of the orbital plates, and the ascending line made to 
touch the surface of the frontal bone behind the prominent 
supra-orbital ridges, the facial angle is not found to exceed 
56°,* Unfortunately, no portions of the facial bones, whose 
conformation is so decisive as regards the form and expression 
of the head, have been preserved. The cranial capacity, com- 
pared with the uncommon strength of the corporeal frame, 
would seem to indicate a small cerebral development. The 
skull, as it is, holds about 31 ounces of millet-seed; and as, 
from the proportionate size of the wanting bones, the whole 
cranial cavity should have about 6 ounces more added, the con- 
tents, were it perfect, may be taken at 37 ounces. Tiedemann 
assigns, as the cranial contents in the Negro, 40, 38, and 35 
ounces. The cranium holds rather more than 36 ounces of 
water which corresponds to a capacity of 1033.24 cubic centi- 
metres. Huschke estimates the cranial contents of a Negress 
at 1127 cubic centimetres; of an old Negro at 1146 cubic cen- 
timetres. The capacity of the Malay skulls, estimated by 
water equalled 36, 33 ounces, whilst in the diminutive Hin- 
doos it falls to as little as 27 ounces." 

After comparing the ^Neanderthal cranium with 
many others, ancient and modern, Professor Schaaff- 
hausen concludes thus : — 

" But the human bones and cranium from the Neanderthal 
exceed all the rest in those peculiarities of conformation which 
lead to the conclusion of their belonging to a barbarous and 
savage race. Whether the cavern in which they were found, 
unaccompanied with any trace of human art, were the place 
of their interment, or whether, like the bones of extinct ani- 
mals elsewhere, they had been washed into it, they may still 

* Estimating the facial angle In the way suggested, on the 
cast I should place it at 64° to 67°. — G. B. 



152 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

be regarded as the most ancient memorial of the early in- 
habitants of Europe." 

Mr. Busk, the translator of Dr. Schaaffliausen's 
paper, has enabled iis to form a very vivid conception of 
the degraded character of the ^Neanderthal skull, by 
placing side by side with its outline, that of the skull of 
a Chimpanzee, drawn to the same absolute size. 

Some time after the publication of the translation of 
Professor Schaaffhausen's Memoir, I was led to study 
the cast of the JSTeanderthal cranium with more atten- 
tion than I had previously bestowed upon it, in conse- 
quence of wishing to supply Sir Charles Lyell with a 
diagram, exhibiting the special peculiarities of this 
skull, as compared with other human skulls. In order 
to do this it was necessary to identify, with precision, 
those points in the skulls compared which corresponded 
anatomically. Of these points, the glabella was obvious 
enough; but when I had distinguished another, defined 
by the occipital protuberance and superior semicircular 
line, and had placed the outline of the E'eanderthal 
skull against that of the Engis skull, in such a position 
that the glabella and occipital protuberance of both were 
intersected by the same straight line, the difference was 
so vast and the flattening of the Neanderthal skull so 
prodigious (compare Figs. 23 and 25 A), that I at first 
imagined I must have fallen into some error. And I 
was the more inclined to suspect this, as, in ordinary 
human skulls, the occipital protuberance and superior 
semicircular curved line on the exterior of the occiput 
correspond pretty closely with the '' lateral sinuses " 
and the line of attachment of the tentorium internally. 
But on the tentorium rests, as I have said in the preced- 
ing Essay, the posterior lobe of the brain ; and hence, 
the occipital protuberance, and the" curved line in ques- 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 158 

tion, indicate^ approximately, tlie lower limits of tliat 
lobe. Was it possible for a bum an being to bave tbe 
brain tbus flattened and depressed; or, on tbe otber 
band, bad tbe muscular ridges sbifted tbeir position? 
In order to solve tbese doubts, and to decide tbe question 
wbetber tbe great supraciliary projections did, or did 
not, arise from tbe development of tbe frontal sinuses, I 
requested Sir Cbarles Lyell to be so good as to obtain 
for me from Dr. Fublrott, tbe possessor of tbe skull, 
answers to certain queries, and if possible a cast, or at 
any rate drawings, or pbotograpbs, of tbe interior of 
tbe skull. 

Dr. Fublrott replied, wdtb a courtesy and readiness 
for wbicb I am infinitely indebted to bim, to my in- 
quiries, and furtbermore sent tbree excellent pboto- 
grapbs. One of tbese gives a side view of tbe skull, and 
from it Fig. 25 A bas been sbaded. Tbe second (Fig. 
26 A) exbibits tbe wide openings of tbe frontal sinuses 
upon the inferior surface of tbe frontal part of tbe 
skull, into wbicb, Dr. Fublrott writes, " a probe may 
be introduced to tbe deptb of an incb," and demon- 
strates tbe great extension of tbe tbickened supraciliary 
ridges beyond tbe cerebral cavity. Tbe tbird, lastly 
(Fig. 26 B), exbibits tbe edge and tbe interior of tbe 
posterior, or occipital, part of tbe skull, and sbows very 
clearly tbe two depressions for tbe lateral sinuses 
sweeping inwards towards tbe middle line of tbe roof of 
tbe skull, to form tbe longitudinal sinus. It was clear, 
therefore, tbat I bad not erred in my interpretation, and 
tbat tbe posterior lobe of tbe brain of tbe JSTeandertbal 
man must bave been as mucb flattened as I suspected it 
to be. 

In trutb, tbe iSTeandertbal cranium bas most extraor- 
dinary characters. It has an extreme length of 8 inches. 



154 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



while its breadth is only 5.75 inches, or, in other words, 
its length is to its breadth as 100:72. It is exceedingly 
depressed, measuring only about '3.4 inches from the 
glabello-occipital line to the vertex. The longitudinal 
arc, measured in the same way as in the Engis skull, is 
12 inches; the transverse arc cannot be exactly ascer- 
tained, in consequence of the absence of the temporal 




Fig. 25. — The skull from the Neanderthal cavern. A, side, B, 
front, and C, top view. One-half the natural size. The out- 
lines from camera lucida drawings, one-half the natural size, 



bones, but was probably about the same, and certainly 
exceeded 10| inches. The horizontal circumference is 
23 inches. But this great circumference arises largely 
from the vast development of the supraciliary ridges, 
though the perimeter of the brain case itself is not 
small. The large supraciliary ridges give the forehead 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 



155 



a far more retreating appearance than its internal con- 
tour would bear out. 

To an anatomical eje, the posterior part of the skull 




by Mr. Busk: the details from the cast and from Dr. Fuhl- 
rott's photographs, a glabella; & occipital protuberance; d 
lambdoidal suture. 



is even more striking than the anterior. The occipital 
protuberance occupies the extreme posterior end of the 
skull, when the glabello-occipital line is made horizontal^ 



156 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



and so far from any part of the occipital region extend- 
ing beyond it, this region of the skull slopes obliquely 
upward and forward, so that the lamboidal suture is 
situated well upon the upper surface of the cranium. 





Fig. 26. — Drawings from Dr. Puhlrott's photographs of parts 
of the interior of the Neanderthal cranium. A view of the 
under and inner surface of the frontal region, showing the in- 
ferior apertures of the frontal sinuses (a). B corresponding 
view of the occipital region of the skull, showing the im- 
pressions of the lateral sinuses (aa) . 

At the same time, notwithstanding the great length of 
the skull, the sagittal suture is remarkably short (4J 
inches,) and the squamosal suture is very straight. 

In reply to my questions Dr. Fuhlrott writes that the 
occipital bone '^ is in a state of perfect preservation as 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. l^f 

far as the upper semicircular line, which is a very 
strong ridge, linear at its extremities, but enlarging to- 
wards the middle, where it forms two ridges (bour- 
relets), united by a linear continuation, which is slightly 
depressed in the middle.'' 

'^ Below the left ridge the bone exhibits an obliquely 
inclined surface, six lines (French) long, and twelve 
lines wide." 

This last must be the surface, the contour of which 
is shown in Fig. 25 A, below 6. It is particularly inter- 
esting, as it suggests that, notwithstanding the flattened 
condition of the occiput, the posterior cerebral lobes 
must have projected considerably beyond the cerebel- 
lum, and as it constitutes one among several points of 
similarity between the Neanderthal cranium and cer- 
tain Australian skulls. 

Such are the two best known forms of human cran- 
ium, which have been found in what may be fairly 
termed a fossil state. Can either be shown to fill up or 
diminish, to any appreciable extent, the structural in- 
terval which exists between Man and the man-like apes ? 
Or, on the other hand, does neither depart more widely 
from the average structure of the human cranium, than 
normally formed skulls of men are known to do at the 
present day ? 

It is impossible to form any opinion on these ques- 
tions, without some preliminary acquaintance with the 
range of variation exhibited by human structure in gen- 
eral — a subject which has been but imperfectly studied, 
while even of what is known, my limits will necessarily 
allow me to give only a very imperfect sketch. 

The student of anatomy is perfectly well aware that 
there is not a single organ of the human body the struc- 



158 , MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

ture of which does not vary, to a greater or less extent^ 
in different individuals. The skeleton varies in the 
proportions, and even to a certain extent in the connec- 
tions, of its constituent bones. The muscles which move 
the bones vary largely in their attachments. The vari- 
eties in the mode of distribution of the arteries are care- 
fully classified, on account of the practical importance 
of a knowledge of their shiftings to the surgeon. The 
characters of the brain vary immensely, nothing being 
less constant than the form and size of the cerebral 
hemispheres, and the richness of the convolutions upon 
their surface, while the most changeable structures of 
all in the human brain are exactly those on which the 
unwise attempt has been made to base the distinctive 
characters of humanity, viz. the posterior cornu of the 
lateral ventricle, the hippocampus minor, and the degree 
of projection of the posterior lobe beyond the cerebel- 
lum. Finally, as all the world knows, the hair and skin 
of human beings may present the most extraordinary 
diversities in colour and in texture. 

So far as our present knowledge goes, the majority of 
the structural varieties to which allusion is here made, 
are individual. The ape-like arrangement of certain 
muscles which is occasionally met with* in the white 
races of mankind, is not known to be more common 
among jSTegroes or Australians : nor because the brain 
of the Hottentot Venus was found to be smoother, to 
have its convolutions more symmetrically disposed, and 
to be, so far, more ape-like than that of ordinary Euro- 
peans, are we justified in concluding a like condition of 
the brain to prevail universally among the lower races 
of mankind, however probable that conclusion may be. 

* See an excellent Essay by Mr. Church on the Myology of 
the Orang, in the Natural History Review for 1861. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. I59 




Fig. 27. — Side and front views of the round and orthog- 
nathous skull of a Calmuck after Von Baer. One-third tlie 
natural size. 



160 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

We are, in fact, sadly wanting in information re- 
specting the disposition of the soft and destructible 
organs of every Race of Mankind but our own ; and 
even of the skeleton, our Museums are lamentably defi- 
cient in every part but the cranium. Skulls enough 
there are, and since the time when Blumenbach and 
Camper first called attention to the marked and singular 
differences which they exhibit, skull collecting and skull 
measuring has been a zealously pursued branch of Nat- 
ural History, and the results obtained have been ar- 
ranged and classified by various writers, among whom 
the late active and able Retzius must always be the first 
named. 

Human skulls have been found to differ from one 
another, not merely in their absolute size and in the 
absolute capacity of the brain case, but in the proportions 
which the diameters of the latter bear to one another ; 
in the relative size of the bones of the face (and more 
particularly of the jaws and teeth) as compared with 
those of the skull ; in the degree to which the upper jaw 
(which is of course followed by the lower) is thrown 
backwards and downwards under the fore part of the 
brain case, or forwards and upwards in front of and be- 
yond it. They differ further in the relations of the 
transverse diameter of the face, taken through the cheek 
bones to the transverse diameter of the skull ; in the 
more rounded or more gable-like form of the roof of the 
skull, and in the degree to which the hinder part of the 
skull is flattened or projects beyond the ridge, into and 
below which the muscles of the neck are inserted. 

In some skulls the brain case may be said to be 
" round/' the extreme length not exceeding the extreme 
breadth by a greater proportion than 100 to 80j while 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 101 

the difference may be miicli less." Men possessing such 
skulls were termed by Retzius '' hrachyceijlialic/' and 
the skull of a Calmuck^ of which a front and side view 
(reduced outline copies of which are given in Fig. 27) 
are depicted by Van Baer in his excellent ^^ Crania 
selecta/' affords a very admirable sample of that kind 
of skull. Other skulls, such as that of a !N'egro copied 
in Fig. 28 from Mr. Busk's ^^ Crania typica/' have a 
very different, greatly elongated form, and may be 
termed ^^ ohlong.^^ In this skull the extreme length is to 
the extreme breadth as 100 to not more than 67, and the 
transverse diameter of the human skull may fall below 
even this proportion. People having such skulls were 
called by Retzius ^' dolichocephalic/' 

The most cursory glance at the side views of these 
two skulls will suffice to prove that they differ, in an- 
other respect, to a very striking extent. The profile of 
the face of the Calmuck is almost vertical, the facial 
bones being thrown downwards and under the fore part 
of the skull. The profile of the face of the ITegro, on 
the other hand, is singularly inclined, the front part of 
the jaws projecting far forward beyond the level of the 
fore part of the skull. In the former case the skull is 
said to be " orthognathous'' or straight-jawed; in the 
latter, it is called " jjrognathous/^ a term which has 
been rendered, with more force than elegance, by the 
Saxon equivalent, — '^ snouty." 

Various methods have been devised in order to ex- 
press with some accuracy the degree of prognathism or 
orthognathism of any given skull ; most of these 
methods being essentially modifications of that devised 

* In no normal human skull does the breadth of the brain 
case exceed its length. 



II 



te^ MAN'Fi PLACE IN NATURE. 




Fig. 28. — Oblong and prognathous skull of a Negro; side and 
front views. One-third of the natural size. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 163 

by Peter Camper, in order to attain what he called 
the ^^ facial angle.'' 

But a little consideration will show that any " facial 
angle " that has been devised, can be competent to ex- 
press the structural modifications involved in prog- 
nathism and orthognathism, only in a rough and general 
sort of way. For the lines, the intersection of which 
forms the facial angle, are drawn through points of the 
skull, the position of each of which is modified by a 
number of circumstances, so that the angle obtained is 
a complex resultant of all these circumstances, and is 
not the expression of any one definite organic relation 
of the parts of the skull. 

I have arrived at the conviction that no comparison 
of crania is w^orth very much that is not founded upon 
the establishment of a relatively fixed base line, to 
which the measurements, in all cases, must be referred, 
^or do I think it is a very difiicult matter to decide 
what that base line should be. The parts of the skull, 
like those of the rest of the animal framework, are 
developed in succession : the base of the skull is formed 
before its sides and roof; it is converted into cartilage 
earlier and more completely than the sides and roof: 
and the cartilaginous base ossifies, and becomes soldered 
into one piece long before the roof. I conceive then that 
the base of the skull may be demonstrated development- 
ally to be its relatively fixed part, the roof and sides 
being relatively movable. 

The same truth is exemplified by the study of the 
modifications which the skull undergoes in ascending 
from the lower animals up to man. 

In such a mammal as a Beaver (Fig. 29), a line 
(a b) drawn through the bones, termed basioccipital, 
basisphenoid, and presphenoid, is very long in propor- 



164 



MAN'S i>LACE IN NATURE. 



BeavET 




Fig. 29. — Longitudinal and vertical sections of the skulls of 
a Beaver (Castor Canadensis), a Lemur (L. Catta), and a 
Baboon (Cynocephalus Papio), a &, the basicraniai axis; & c, 
the occipital plane; i T, the tentorial plane; a d, the olfactory 
plane; f e, the basifacial axis; ch a, occipital angle; T i a, ten- 
torial angle; dab, olfactory angle; e f h, craniofacial angle; 
g h, extreme length of the cavity which lodges the cerebral 
hemispheres or " cerebral length." The length of the basi- 
craniai axis as to this length, or, in other words, the propor- 
tional length of the line g h to that of a 6 taken as 100, in 
the three skulls, is as follows: — Beaver, 70 to 100; Lemur, 119 
to 100; Baboon, 144 to 100. In an adult male Gorilla the cere- 
bral length is as 170 to the basicraniai axis taken as 100, in the 
Negro (Fig. 30) as 236 to 100. In the Constantinople skull 
(Fig. 30) it is as 266 to 100. The difference between the high- 
est Ape's skull and the lowest Man's is therefore very strik- 
ingly brought out by these measurements. 

In the diagram of the Baboon's skull the dotted lines d^ d\ 
&c., give the angles of the Lemur's and Beaver's skull, as laii 
down upon the basicraniai axis of the Baboon, The line a 6 
has the same length in each diagram. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 165 

tion to the extreme length of the cavity which contains 
the cerebral hemispheres {g h). The plane of the occi- 
pital foramen (he) forms a slightly acute angle with 
this ^' basicranial axis/' while the plane of the tentor- 
ium (i T) is inclined at rather more than 90° to the 
^^ basicranial axis " ; and so is the plane of the perfor- 
ated plate (a d), by which the filaments of the olfactory 
nerve leave the skull. Again, a line drawn through the 
axis of the face, between the bones called ethmoid and 
vomer — the '^ basifacial axis" (/. e.) forms an exceed- 
ingly obtuse angle, where, wdien produced, it cuts the 
^' basicranial axis." 

If the angle made by the line h c with a h, be called 
the " occipital angle," and the angle made by the line 
a d with a b he termed the " olfactory angle " and that 
made by i T with a h the ^^ tentorial angle " then all 
these, in the mammal in question, are nearly right 
angles, varying between 80° and 110°. The angle e f h, 
or that made by the cranial with the facial axis, and 
Avhich may be termed the " craniofacial angle," is ex- 
tremely obtuse, amounting, in the case of the Beaver, to 
at least 150°. 

But if a series of sections of mammalian skulls, inter- 
mediate between a Rodent and a Man (Fig. 29,) be 
examined, it will be found that in the higher crania the 
basicranial axis becomes shorter relatively to the cere- 
bral length ; that the '^ olfactory angle " and ^^ occipital 
angle " become more obtuse ; and that the " craniofacial 
angle," becomes more acute by the bending down, as it 
were, of the facial axis upon the cranial axis. At the 
same time, the roof of the cranium becomes more and 
more arched, to allow of the increasing height of the 
cerebral hemispheres, which is eminently characteristi?- 
of man, as well as of that backward extension, beyond 



166 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

the cerebellum, which reaches its maximum in the 
South American Monkeys. So that, at last, in the 
human skull (Fig. 30,) the cerebral length is between 
twice and thrice as great as the length of the basicranial 




Fig. 30. — Sections of orthognathous (light contour) and 
prognathous (dark contour) skulls, one-third of the natural 
size, a b, Basicranial axis; & c, &' c', plane of the occipital: 
foramen; d d\ hinder end of the palatine bone; e e\ front end 
of the upper jaw; T T", insertion of the tentorium. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 16^ 

axis; the olfactory plane is 20° or 30° on the under 
side of that axis; the occipital angle, instead of being 
less than 90°, is as much as 150° or 160° ; the cranio- 
facial angle may be 90° or less, and the vertical height 
of the skull may have a large proportion to its length. 

It will be obvious, from an inspection of the dia- 
grams, that the basicranial axis is, in the ascending 
series of Mammalia, a relatively fixed line, on which 
the bones of the sides and roof of the cranial cavity, and 
of the face, may be said to revolve downwards and for- 
wards or backwards, according to their position. The 
arc described by any one bone or plane, however, is not 
by any means always in proportion to the arc described 
by another. 

IvTow comes the important question, can we discern, 
between the lowest and the highest forms of the human 
cranium anything answering, in however slight a degree, 
to this revolution of the side and roof bones of the skull 
upon the basicranial axis observed upon so great a scale 
in the mammalian series ? Numerous observations lead 
me to believe that we must answer this question in the 
affirmative. 

The diagrams in Fig. 30 are reduced from very care- 
fully made diagrams of sections of four skulls, two 
round and orthognathous, two long and prognathous, 
taken longitudinally and vertically, through the middle. 
The sectional diagrams have then been superimposed, 
in such a manner, that the basal axes of the skulls 
coincide by their anterior ends, and in their direction. 
The deviations of the rest of the contours (which rep- 
resent the interior of the skulls only) show the differ- 
ences of the skulls from one another, when these axes 
are regarded as relatively fixed lines. 

The dark contours are those of an Australian and 



168 MAN'S PLAOE IN NATURE. 

of a 'Negro skull : the light contours are those of a Tartai* 
skull, in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons ; 
and of a well developed round skull from a cemetery in 
Constantinople, of uncertain race, in my own pos- 
session. 

It appears, at once, from these, views, that the prog- 
nathous skulls, so far as their jaws are concerned, do 
really differ from the orthognathous in much the same 
way as, though to a far less degree than^ the skulls of 
the lower mammals differ from those of Man. Fur- 
thermore, the plane of the occipital foramen (be) forms 
a somewhat smaller angle with the axis in these particu- 
lar prognathous skuhs than in the orthognathous ; 
and the like may be slightly true of the perforated plate 
of the ethmoid — though this point is not so clear. But 
it is singular to remark that, in another respect, the 
prognathous skulls are less ape-like than the orthog- 
nathous, the cerebral cavity projecting decidedly more 
beyond the anterior end of the axis in the prognathous, 
than in the orthognathous, skulls. 

It will be observed that these diagrams reveal an im- 
mense range of variation in the capacity and relative 
proportion to the cranial axis, of the different regions 
of the cavity which contains the brain, in the different 
skulls. Xor is the difference in the extent to which the 
cerebral overlaps the cerebellar cavity less singular. 
A round skull (Fig. 30, Const.) may have a greater 
posterior cerebral projection than a long one (Fig. 30, 
Negro). 

Until human crania have been largely worked out in 
a manner similar to that here suggested — until it shall 
be an opprobrium to an ethnological collection to pos- 
sess a single skull which is not bisected longitudinally 
— until the angles and measurements here mentioned, 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 169 

together with a number of others of which I cannot 
speak in this place, are determined, and tabulated with 
reference to the basicranial axis as unity, for largo 
numbers of skulls of the different races of Mankind, I 
do not think we shall have any very safe basis for that 
ethnological craniology which aspires to give the ana- 
tomical characters of the crania of the different Races 
of Mankind. 

At present, I believe that the general outlines of what 
may be safely said upon that subject may be summed 
up in a very few words. Draw a line on a globe, 
from the Gold Coast in Western Africa to the steppes of 
Tartary. At the southern and western end of that line 
there live the most dolichocephalic, prognathous, curly- 
haired, dark-skinned of men — the true Negroes. At the 
northern and eastern end of the same line there live the 
most brachycephalic, orthognathous, straight-haired, 
yellow-skinned of men — the Tartars and Calmucks. The 
two ends of this imaginary line are indeed, so to speak, 
ethnological antipodes. A line drawn at right angles, 
or nearly so, to this polar line through Europe and 
Southern Asia to Hindostan, Avould give us a sort of 
equator, around which round-headed, oval-headed, and 
oblong-headed, prognathous and orthognathous, fair 
and dark races — but none possessing the excessively 
marked characters of Calmuck or ^egro — group them- 
selves. 

It is worthy of notice that the regions of the an- 
tipodal races are antipodal in climate, the greatest 
contrast the world affords, perhaps, being that between 
the damp, hot, steaming, alluvial coast plains of the 
West Coast of Africa and the arid, elevated steppes 
and plateaux of Central Asia, bitterly cold in winter, 
and as far from the sea as any part of the world can be. 



170 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

From Central Asia eastward to the Pacific Islands 
and subcontinents on the one hand, and to America on 
the other, brachycephaly and orthognathism gradually 
diminish, and are replaced by dolichocephaly and 
prognathism, less, however, on the American Continent 
(throughout the whole length of which a rounded type 
of skull prevails largely, but not exclusively)* than 
in the Pacific region, where, at length, on the Australian 
Continent and in the adjacent islands, the oblong skull, 
the projecting jaws, and the dark skin reappear; with so 
much departure, in other respects, from the ^egro type, 
that ethnologists assign to these people the special title 
of " Negritoes." 

The Australian skull is remarkable for its narrow- 
ness and for the thickness of its walls, especially in 
the region of the supraciliary ridge, wdiich is frequently, 
though not by any means invariably, solid throughout, 
the frontal sinuses remaining undeveloped. The nasal 
depression, again, is extremely sudden, so that the 
brows overhang and give the countenance a particularly 
lowering, threatening expression. The occipital region 
of the skull, also, not unfrequently becomes less prom- 
inent; so that it not only fails to project beyond a line 
drawn perpendicular to the hinder extremity of the 
glabello-occipital line, but even, in some cases, begins to 
shelve away from it, forAvards, almost immediately. In 
consequence of this circumstance, the parts of the oc- 
cipital bone which lie above and below the tuberosity 
make a much more acute angle with one another than is 
usual, whereby the hinder part of the base of the skulL 
appears obliquely truncated. Many Australian skulls 

* See Dr. D. Wilson's valuable paper " On the supposed prev- 
alence of one Cranial Type throughout the American Abori^ 
gines." — Canadian Journal, Vol, II., 1857. 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 



171 



have a considerable height, quite equal to that of the 
average of any other race, but there are others in which 
the cranial roof becomes remarkably depressed, the 
skull, at the same time, elongating so much that, prob- 
ably, its capacity is not diminished. The majority 
of skulls possessing these characters, which I have seen, 
are from the neighbourhood of Port Adelaide in South 




Fig. 31. — An Australian skull from Western Port, in the 
Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, with the contour 
of the Neanderthal skull. Both reduced to one-third the 
natural size. 



Australia, and have been used by the natives as water 
vessels ; to which end the face has been knocked away, 
and a string passed through the vacuity and the occipital 
foramen, so that the skull was suspended by the greater 
part of its basis. 

Fig. 31 represents the contour of a skull of this kind 
from Western Port, with the jaw attached, and of the 



172 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

i^eanderthal skull, both reduced to one-third of the size 
of nature. A small additional amount of flattening and 
lengthening, with a corresponding increase of the 
supraciiiarj ridge, would convert the Australian brain 
case into a form identical with that of the aberrant 
fossil. 

And now, to return to the fossil skulls, and to the 
rank which they occupy among, or beyond, these existing 
varieties of cranial conformation. In the first place, I 
must remark, that, as Professor Schmerling well ob- 
served {supra, p. 161) in commenting upon the Engis 
skull the formation of a safe judgment upon the ques- 
tion is greatly hindered by the absence of the jaws from 
both the crania, so that there is no means of deciding, 
with certainty, whether they w^ere more or less progna- 
thous than the lower existing races of mankind. And 
yet, as we have seen, it is more in this respect than any 
other, that human skulls vary, towards and from, the 
brutal type — the brain case of an average dolichoce- 
phalic European differing far less from that of a E"egro, 
for example, than his jaws do. In the absence of the 
jaws, then, any judgment on the relations of the fossil 
skulls to recent Races must be accepted with a certain 
reservation. 

But taking the evidence as it stands, and turning first 
to the Engis skull, I confess I can find no character in 
the remains of that cranium which, if it were a recent 
skull, would give any trustworthy clue as to the Race to 
which it might appertain. Its contours and measure- 
ments agree very well with those of some Australian 
skulls which I have examined — and especially has it a 
tendency towards that occipital flattening, to the great 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAIN^ OF MAN. 173 

extent of which, in some Australian skulls, I have al- 
luded. But all Australian skulls do not present this 
flattening, and the supraciliarj ridge of the Engis skull 
is quite unlikethat of the typical Australians. 

On the other hand, its measurements agree equally 
well with those of some European skulls. And assuredly, 
there is no mark of degradation about any part of its 
structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, 
which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might 
have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage. 

The case of the ISTeanderthal skull is very different. 
Under whatever aspect we view this cranium, whether 
we regard its vertical depression, the enormous thickness 
of its supraciliary ridges, its sloping occiput, or its long 
and straight squamosal suture, Ave meet with ape-like 
characters, stamping it as the most pithecoid of human 
crania yet discovered. But Professor Schaaffhausen 
states (supra, p. 178), that the cranium, in its present 
condition, holds 1033.24 cubic centimetres of water, or 
about 63 cubic inches, and as the entire skull could hard- 
ly have held less than an additional 12 cubic inches, its 
capacity may be estimated at about 75 cubic inches, 
which is the average capacity given by Morton for 
Polynesian and Hottentot skulls. 

So large a mass of brain as this, would alone suggest 
that the pithecoid tendencies, indicated by this sku.l, 
did not extend deep into the organization ; and this con- 
clusion is borne out by the dimensions of the other bones 
of the skeleton given by Professor Schaaffhausen, which 
show that the absolute height and relative proportions of 
the limbs, were quite those of an European of middle 
stature. The bones are indeed stouter, but this and the 
great development of the muscular ridges noted by Dr. 
Schaaffhausen, are characters to be expected in savages. 



174 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

The Patagonians, exposed without shelter or protection 
to a climate possibly not very dissimilar from that of 
Europe at the time during which the ISTeanderthal man 
lived, are remarkable for the stoutness of their limb 
bones. 

In no sense, then, can the ^Neanderthal bones be 
regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate 
between Men and Apes. At most, they demonstrate the 
existence of a Man whose skull may be said to revert 
somewhat towards the pithecoid type — just as a Carrier, 
or a Pouter, or a Tumbler, may sometimes put on the 
plumage of its primitive stock, the Columha livia. 
And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of known 
human skulls, the INeanderthal cranium is by no means 
so isolated as it appears to be at first, but forms, in 
reality, the extreme term of a series leading gradually 
from it to the highest and best developed of human 
crania. On the one hand, it is closely approached by 
the flattened Australian skulls, of which I have spoken, 
from which other Australian forms lead us gradually 
up to skulls having very much the type of the Engis 
cranium. And, on the other hand, it is even more 
closely affined to the skulls of certain ancient people who 
inhabited Denmark during the " stone period,'' and 
were probably either contemporaneous with, or later 
than, the makers of the " refuse heaps," or '^ Kjokken- 
moddings " of that country. 

The correspondence between the longitudinal contour 
of the ^N'eanderthal skull and that of some of those 
skulls from the tumuli at Borreby, very accurate drawr 
ings of which have been made by Mr. Busk, is very 
close. The occiput is quite as retreating, the supracil- 
iary ridges are nearly as prominent, and the skull is as 
low. Furthermore, the Borreby skull resembles the 



ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN. 175 




Fig. 32. — Ancient Danish skull from a tumulus at Borreby; 
one-third of the natural size. From a camera lucida drawing 
by Mr. Busk. 



176 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

iSTeanderthal form more closely than any of tlie Austra- 
lian skulls do, by the much more rapid retrocession of 
the forehead. On the other hand, the Borreby skulls 
are all somewhat broader, in proportion to their length, 
than the jSTeanderthal skull, while some attain that 
proportion of breadth to length (80:100) which consti- 
tutes brachycephaly."^ 

In conclusion, I may say, that the fossil remains of 
Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us 
appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by 
the modification of which he has, probably, become wha1; 
he is. And considei-ing what is now known of the 
most ancient Races of men ; seeing that they fashioned 
flint axes and flint knives and bone-skewers, of much the 
same pattern as those fabricated by the lowest savages 
at the present day, and that we have every reason to 
believe the habits and modes of living of such people to 
have remained the same from the time of the Mammoth 
and the tichorhine Rhinoceros till now, I do not know 
that this result is other than might be expected. 

Where, then, must we look for primasval Man ? Was 
the oldest Homo sapiens pliocene or miocene, or yet 



[* For a further discussion of the characters of the Nean- 
derthal skull, see " Natural History Review," 1864. I there 
say (p. 443): "That the Neanderthal skull exhibits the low- 
est type of human cranium at present known, so far as it pre- 
sents certain pithecoid characters in a more exaggerated form 
than any other: but that, inasmuch as a complete series of 
gradations can be found, among recent human skulls, between 
it and the best developed forms, there is no ground for sep- 
arating its possessor specifically, still less generically, from' 
Homo sapiens. At present, we have no sufficient warranty for 
declaring it to be either the type of a distinct race, or a mem- 
ber of any existing one; nor do the anatomical characters of 
the skull justify any conclusion as to the age to which it be- 
longs." See also the essay on the Aryan question in this vol- 
ume. 1894.] 



OH SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MA^. If? 

Inore ancient ? In still older strata do the fossilized 
bones of an ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pith- 
ecoid, than any jet known await the researches of some 
unborn paleontologist ? 

Time will show. But, in the meanwhile, if any form 
of the doctrine of progressive development is correct, 
we must extend by long epochs the most liberal estimate 
that has yet been made of the antiquity of Man. 

12 



178 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



IV. 

ojst the methods ai^d eesults of 
eth:nology. 

[1865.] 

Ethnology is the science whicli determines the 
distinctive characters of the persistent modifications of 
mankind; which ascertains the distribution of those 
modifications in present and past times, and seeks to 
discover the causes, or conditions of existence, both of 
the modifications and of their distribution. I say 
^^ persistent " modifications, because, unless incidental- 
ly, ethnology has nothing to do with chance and tran- 
sitory peculiarities of human structure. And I speak 
of ^' persistent modifications " or ^' stocks " rather than 
of ^' varieties," or ^' races,'' or " species," because each 
of these last w^ell-knowm terms implies, on the part of 
its employer, a preconceived opinion touching one of 
those problems, the solution of which is the ultimate 
object of the science ; and in regard to w^hich, therefore, 
ethnologists are especially bound to keep their minds 
open and their judgments freely balanced. 

Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of Ai^thro- 
POLOGY^ the great science which unravels the complex- 
ities of human structure ; traces out the relations of man 
to other animals ; studies all that is especially human 
in the mode in which man's complex functions are 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 179 

performed; and searches after the conditions which 
have determined his presence in the world. And an- 
thropology is a section of Zoology, which again is the- 
animal half of Biology — the science of life and living 
things. 

Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objectiS 
of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following 
which he may ho]3e to reach his goal, are diverse. He 
may work at man from the point of view of the pure 
zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physio- 
logical peculiarities of ^NTegroes, Australians, or Mon- 
golians, just as he would inquire into those of pointers, 
terriers, and turnspits, — '' persistent modifications " of 
man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek 
aid from researches into the most human manifesta- 
tion of humanity — Language ; and assuming that what 
is true of speech is true of the speaker — a hypothesis as 
questionable in science as it is in ordinary life — he may 
apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn 
from a searching analysis of their words and gram- 
matical forms. 

Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the 
practical life of men ; and relying upon the inherent 
conservatism and small inventiveness of untutored man- 
kind, he may hope to discover in manners and customs, 
or in weapons, dwellings, and other handiwork, a clew 
to the origin of the resemblances and differences of 
nations. Or, he may resort to that kind of evidence 
which is yielded by History proper, and consists of the 
beliefs of men concerning past events, embodied in tra- 
ditional, or in written testimony. Or, when that thread 
breaks. Archaeology, which is the interpretation of the 
unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging to the 
epoch since the world has reached its present condition^ 



1§0 MAN'S PLAdE In NaTOM. 

may still guide him. And, when even the dim light of 
archgeology fades, there yet remains Palaeontology, 
which, in these latter years has brought to daylight 
once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose 
world was not our world, Avho have been buried in river 
beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of waters 
into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of 
tradition. 

Along each, or all, of these paths the ethnologist may 
press towards his goal ; but they are not equally straight, 
or sure, or easy to tread. The way of palaeontology has 
but just been laid open to us. Archaeological and his- 
torical investigations are of great value for all those 
peoples whose ancient state has differed widely from 
their present condition, and who have the good or evil 
fortune to possess a history. But on taking a broad 
survey of the world, it is astonishing how few nations 
present either condition. Respecting five-sixths of the 
persistent modifications of mankind, history and arch- 
aeology are absolutely silent. For half the rest, they 
might as well be silent for anything that is to be made 
of their testimony. And, finally, when the question 
arises as to what was the condition of mankind more 
than a paltry two or three thousand years ago, history 
and archaeology are, for the most part, mere dumb dogs. 
What light does either of these branches of knowledge 
throw on the past of the man of the 'New World, if we 
except the Central Americans and the Peruvians; on 
that of the Africans, save those of the Valley of the JSTile 
and a fringe of the Mediterranean ; on that of all the 
Polynesian, Australian, and central Asiatic peoples, the 
former of whom probably, and the last certainly, were, 
at the dawn of history, substantially what they are 
now ? While thankfully accepting what history has 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 181 

to give him, therefore, the ethnologist must not look 
for too much from her. 

Is more to be expected from inquiries into the cus- 
toms and handicrafts of man ? It is to be feared not. 
In reasoning from identity of custom to identity of 
stock the difficulty always obtrudes itself, that the 
minds of men being everywhere similar, differing in 
quality and quantity but not in kind of faculty, like 
circumstances must tend to produce like contrivances ; 
at any rate, so long as the need to be met and conquered 
is of a very simple kind. That two nations use cala- 
bashes or shells for drinking-vessels, or that they employ 
spears, or clubs, or swords and axes of stone and metal 
as weapons and implements, cannot be regarded as 
evidence that these two nations had a common origin, or 
even that intercommunication ever took place between 
them; seeing that the convenience of using calabashes 
or shells for such purposes, and the advantage of poking 
an enemy with a sharp stick, or hitting him with a heavy 
one, must be early forced by nature upon the mind of 
even the stupidest savage. And when he had found 
out the use of a stick, he would need no prompting to 
discover the value of a chipped or whetted stone, or of 
an angular piece of native metal, for the same object. 
On the other hand, it may be doubted, whether the 
chances are not greatly against independent peoples 
arriving at the manufacture of a boomerang, or of a 
bow ; wdiich last, if one comes to think of it, is a rather 
complicated apparatus; and the tracing of the dis- 
tribution of inventions as complex as these, and of 
such strange customs as betel-chewing and tobacco-smok- 
ing, may afford valuable ethnological hints. 

Since the time of Leibnitz, and guided by such men 
as Humboldt, Abel Remusat, and Klaproth, Philology 



182 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

has taken far higher ground. Thus Prichard affirms 
that ^' the history of nations, termed Ethnology, must 
be mainly founded on the relations of their languages." 
An eminent living philologer, August Schleicher, 
in a recent essay, puts forward the claims of his science 
still more forcibly : — 

" If, however, language is the human kut^ e^oiprja, the sug- 
gestion arises whether it should not form the iDasis of any 
scientific systematic arrangement of mankind; whether the 
foundation of the natural classification of the genus Homo has 
not been discovered in it. 

" How little constant are cranial peculiarities and other so- 
called race characters! Language, on the other hand, is al- 
ways a perfectly constant diagnostic. A German may occasion- 
ally compete in hair and prognathism with a negro, but a 
negro language will never be his mother tongue. Of how little 
importance for mankind the so-called race characters are, is 
shown by the fact that speakers of languages belonging to 
one and the same linguistic family may exhibit the peculiari- 
ties of various races. Thus the settled Osmanli Turk exhibits 
Caucasian characters, whilst other so-called Tartaric Turks 
exemplify the Mongol type. On the other hand, the Magyar 
and the Basque do not depart in any essential physical pecu- 
liarity from the Indo-Germans, whilst the Magyar, Basque, and 
Indo-Germanic tongues are widely different. Apart from their 
inconstancy, again, the so-called race characters can hardly 
yield a scientifically natural system. Languages, on the other 
hand, readily fall into a natural arrangement, like that of 
which other vital products are susceptible, especially when 
viewed from their morphological side. . . . The externally 
visible structure of the cerebral and facial skeletons, and of 
the body generally, is less important than that no less ma- 
terial but infinitely more delicate corporeal structure, the 
function of which is speech. I conceive, therefore, that the 
natural classification of languages is also the natural 
classification of mankind. With language, moreover, all the 
higher manifestations of man's vital activity are closely inter- 
woven, so that these receive due recognition in and by that 
of speech."* 

Without the least desire to depreciate the value oi 
philology as an adjuvant to ethnology, I must venture 
to doubt, with Rudolphi, Desmoulins, Crawfurd, and 

* August Schleicher. TJeher die Bedeutung der Sprache fur 
die Naturgeschichte des Menschen, pp. 16 — 18. Weimar, 1858. 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. l83 

otliers, its title to the leading position claimed for it by 
the writers whom I have just quoted. On the contrary^ 
it seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of 
any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may 
afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of 
stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot 
be held to prove that unity of stock, unless philologers 
are prepared to demonstrate, that no nation can lose 
its language and acquire that of a distinct nation, Vv4th- 
out a change of blood corresponding with the change of 
language. Desmoulins long ago put this argument ex- 
ceedingly Avell : — 

"Let us imagine the recurrence of one of those slow, or 
sudden political revolutions, or say of those secular changes 
which among different people and at different epochs have 
annihilated historical monuments and even extinguished tra- 
dition. In that case, the evidence, now so clear, that the 
negroes of Haj'ti were slaves imported by a French colony, 
who, by the very effect of the subordination involved in slav- 
ery lost their own diverse languages and adopted that of their 
masters, would vanish. And metaphysical philosophers, ob- 
serving the identity of Haytian French with that spoken on 
the shores of the Seine and the Loire, would argue that the 
men of St. Domingo with woolly heads, black and oily skins, 
small calves, and slightly bent knees, are of the same race, 
descended from the same parental stock, as the Frenchmen 
with silky brown, chestnut, or fair hair, and white skins. 
For they would say, their languages are more similar than 
French is to German or Spanish." * 

It must not be imagined that the case put by Des- 
moulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events precisely 
similar to the transport of a body of Africans to the 
West India Islands, indeed, cannot have happened 
among uncivilised races, but similar results have fol- 
lowed the importation of bodies of conquerors among an 
enslaved people over and over again. There is hardly a 

* Desmoulins, Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines, p. 
345, 1826. 



184 MaN^s place in nature. 

country in Europe in which two or more nations speak- 
ing widely different tongues have not become inter- 
mixed ; and there is hardly a language of Europe of 
which we have any right to think that its structure 
affords a just indication of the amount of that inter- 
mixture. 

As Dr. Latham has well said : — 

" It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo- 
Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are 
unimportant. It is by no means so certain that the blood of 
Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast amount of Kelticism, 
not found in our tongue, very probably exists in our pedi- 
grees. The ethnology of France is still more complicated. 
Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the strength of 
his language; whilst others make him a Kelt on the strength 
of certain moral characteristics, combined with the previous 
Kelticism of the original Gauls. Spanish and Portuguese, as 
languages, are derivations from the Latin; Spain and Portu- 
gal, as countries, are Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab, in dif- 
ferent proportions. Italian is modern Latin all the world over; 
yet surely there must be much Keltic blood in Lombardy, and 
much Etruscan intermixture in Tuscany. 

" In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the 
Niemen spoke some Slavonic dialect; they now nearly all 
speak German. Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic 
than the speech." * 

In other words, what philologer, if he had nothing 
but the vocabulary and grammar of the Frencli and 
English languages to guide him, w^ould dream of the 
real causes of the unlikeness of a IvTorman to a Prov- 
encal, of an Orcadian to a Cornishman ? How read- 
ily might he be led to suppose that the different clim- 
atal conditions to which these speakers of one tongue 
have so long been exposed, have caused their physical 
differences ; and how little would he suspect that these 
are due (as we happen to know they are) to wide 
differences of blood. 

* Latham, Man and his Migrations, p. 171. 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 185 

Few take duly into account the evidence which exists 
as to the ease with Avhich unlettered savages gain or 
lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting 
" Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western 
Pacific/' especially remarks upon the '' avidity Avitii 
which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melan- 
esia, from Xew Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt 
the improvements of a more perfect language than 
their own, which different causes and accidental com- 
munication still continue to bring to them ;" and he adds 
that '' among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was 
found by us which did not possess, in some cases still 
imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in ad- 
dition to their own, in which they reckon only to five." 

Yet how much philological reasoning in favour of 
the aflinity or diversity of two distinct peoples has 
been based on the mere comparison of numerals ! 

But the most instructive example of the fallacy 
which may attach to merely philological reasonings, is 
that afforded by the Feejeans, Avho are, physically, so 
intimately connected with the adjacent Xegritos of 
I^ew Caledonia, &c., that no one can doubt to what 
stock they belong, and who yet, in the form and sub- 
stance of their language, are Polynesian. The case 
is as remarkable as if the Canary Islands should have 
been found to be inhabited by negroes speaking Arabic, 
or some other clearly Semitic dialect, as their mother 
tongue. As it happens, the physical peculiarities of 
the Feejeans are so striking, and the conditions under 
which they live are so similar to those of the Polyne- 
sians, that no one has ventured to suggest that they 
are merely modified Polynesians — a suggestion which 
could otherwise certainly have been made. But if 
languages may be thus transferred f rorti one stock to an- 



186 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



other, without any corresponding intermixture of blood, 
what ethnological value has philology ? — what security 
does unity of language afford us that the speakers of 
that language may not have sprung from two, or three, 
or a dozen, distinct sources ? 

Thus we come, at last, to the purely zoologicalmethod, 
from which it is not unnatural to expect more than 
from any other, seeing that, after all, the problems of 
ethnology are simply those which are presented to the 
zoologist by every widely distributed animal he studies. 
The father of modern zoology seems to have had no 
doubt upon this point. At the twenty-eighth page of the 
standard twelfth edition of the " Systema Naturae," in 
fact, we find: — • 



I. Primates. 

Denies primores incisores: superiores IV. paralteli, 
mammce pectorales 11. 



1. Homo. 
Sapiens. 
Ferus. 

Americanus a 



Europceus 



Asiaticus y 



Afer 6 



Nosce te ipsum. 

1. H. diurnus: varians cultura, loco. 

Tetrapus, mutiis, hirsutus. 

Rufus, cholericus, rectus — Pilis nigris, rec- 

tis, crassis — Naribus patulis — Facie ephe- 

litica: Mento siibimberbi. 
Pertinax, contentus, liber. Pingit se lineis 

deedaleis rubris. 
Regitur Consuetudine. 
Albus sanguineus torosus. Pilis flavescenti- 

bus, prolixis. 
Oculis coeruleis. 

Levis, argutus, inventor. Tegitur Vesti- 

mentis arctis. Regitur Ritibus. 
Luridus, melancholicus, rigidus. Pilis ni- 

gricantibus. Oculis fuscis. Severus, fas- 

tuosus, avarus. Legitur Indumentis laxils. 
Niger, phlegmaticus, laxus. Pilis atris, con- 
Regitur Opinionibus. 

tortuplicatis, Cute holosericea. Naso 

simo. Lahiis tumidis. Feminis sinus pu- 

doris. 
Mammw lactantes prolixaB, 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 187 

Vafer, segnis, negligens. Ungit se pingui. 
Regitur Arbitrio. 
Mons'trosus e Solo (a) et arte (b c) variat.: 

a. Alpini parvi, agiles, timidi. 
Patagonici magni, segnes. 

b. Monorchides ut minus fertiles: Hotten- 
totti. 

Juncece puellae, abdomine attenuato: Eu- 
ropaese. 

c. MacrocepJiali capiti conico: Chinenses. 
Plagiocephali capite antice compresso: 
Canadenses, 

Turn a few pages further on in the same volume, 
and there appears, with a fine impartiality in the distri- 
bution of capitals and subdivisional headings: — - 

III Fer^. 

Denies primores superiores sex, acutiuscuU. Canini 
soUtarii. 



12. Caxis. Denies primores superiores VL: laterales 

longiores distantes: intermedii lobati. In- 
feriores VL: laterales lobati. 
Laniarii solitarii, incurvati. 
Molares VL s. VIL (pluresve quam in reli- 
quis.) 

familiaris 1. C. cauda (sinistrorsum) recurvata 

domesiicus a auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata. 

sagax 6 auriculis pendulis, digito spurio ad tibias 

posticas. 

grains y magnitudine lupi, trunco curvato, rostro at- 

tenuato, &c., &c. 

Linnseus' definition of what he considers to be mere 
varieties of the species Man are, it will be observed, as 
completely free from any allusion to linguistic pecu- 
liarities as those brief and pregnant sentences in which 
he sketches the characters of the varieties of the species 
Dog. ^' Pilis nigris, naribus patulis " may be set 
against '' auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata; " while 
the remarks on the morals and manners of the humaiL 



188 MAN S PLACE IN NATURE. 

subject seem as if thej were thrown in merely by way of 
makeweight. 

Buff on, Blumenbach (the founder of ethnology as a 
special science), Rudolphi, Bory de St. Vincent, Des- 
moulins, Cuvier, Retzius, indeed I may say all the 
naturalists proper, have dealt with man from a no less 
completely zoological point of view ; while, as might 
have been expected, those who have been least nat- 
uralists, and most linguists, have most neglected the 
zoological method, the neglect culminating in those who 
have been altogether devoid of acquaintance with 
anatomy. 

Prichard's proposition, that language is more persis- 
tent than physical characters, is one which has never 
been proved, and indeed admits of no proof, seeing 
that the records of language do not extend so far as 
those of physical characters. But, until the superior 
tenacity of linguistic over physical peculiarities is 
shown, and until the abundant evidence wdiich exists, 
that the language of a people may change without cor- 
responding physical change in that people, is showm to 
be valueless, it is plain that the Zoological court of ap- 
peal is the highest for the ethnologist, and that no evi- 
dence can be set against that derived from physical 
characters. 

What, then, will a new survey of mankind from the 
Linnean point of view teach us ? 

The great antipodal block of land we call Australia 
has, speaking roughly, the form of a vast quadrangle,' 
2,000 miles on the side, and extends from the hottest 
tropical to the middle of the temperate zone. Setting- 
aside the foreign colonists introduced within the last 
century, it is inhabited by people no less remarkable 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 180 

for the uniformity^ than for the singularity, of their 
physical characters and social state. For the most part 
of fair stature, erect and well built, except for an un- 
usual slenderness of the lower limbs, the Australians 
have dark, usually chocolate-coloured skins; fine dark 
wavy hair ; dark eyes, overhung by beetle brows ; coarse, 
projecting jaws; broad and dilated, but not especially 
flattened, noses, and lips which, though prominent, are 
eminently flexible. 

The skulls of these people are always long and nar- 
row, Avith a smaller development of the frontal sinuses 
than usually corresponds with such largely developed 
brow ridges. An Australian skull of a round form, 
or one the transverse diameter of which exceeds eight- 
tenths of its length, has never been seen. These people, 
in a word, are eminently ^' dolichocephalic," or long- 
headed ; but, with this one limitation, their crania 
present considerable variations, some being compar- 
atively high and arched, while others are more re- 
markably depressed than almost any other human 
skulls. The female pelvis differs comparative^ little 
from the European ; but in the pelves of male Austra- 
lians which I have examined, the antero-posterior and 
transverse diameters approach equality more nearly 
than is the case in Europeans. 

'No Australian tribe has ever been known to cultivate 
the ground,^ to use metals, pottery, or any kind of 
textile fabric. They rarely construct huts. Their 
means of navigation are limited to rafts or canoes, 
made of sheets of bark. Clothing, except skin cloaks 
for protection from cold, is a superfluity with which 

[* At Cape York we found that the natives had learned from 
their Papuan neighbours to grow a little coarse tobacco; and, 
elsewhere, yams are said to be grown, but hardly cultivated. 
Plaiting, basket-making and netting are practised.— 1894.] 



l90 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

tliej dispense; and though they have some singular 
weapons, almost peculiar to themselves, they are wholly 
unacquainted with bows and arrows. 

It is but a step, as it were, across Bass's Straits to 
Tasmania. Neither climate nor the characteristic 
forms of vegetable or animal life change largely on 
the south side of the Straits, but the early voyagers 
found Man singularly different from him on the north 
side. The skin of the Tasmanian was dark, though 
he lived between parallels of latitude corresponding 
with those of middle Europe in our own hemisphere ; 
his javv^s projected, his head was long and narrow; his 
civilization v;as about on a footing with that of the 
Australian, if not lower, for I cannot discover that the 
Tasmanian understood the use of the throwing-stick. 
But he differed from the Australian in his woolly, 
negro-like hair ; whence the name of i^egrito, which 
has been applied to him and his congeners. 

Such Negritos — differing more or less from the Tas- 
manian but agreeing with him in dark skin and woolly 
hair — occupy New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, the 
Louisiade Archipelago ; and stretching to the Papuan 
Islands, and for a doubtful extent beyond them to the 
north and west, form a sort of belt, or zone, of Negrito 
population, interposed between the Australians on the 
west and the inhabitants of the great majority of the 
Pacific islands on the east. 

The cranial characters of the Negritos vary consider- 
ably more than those of their skin and hair, the most 
notable circumstance being the strong Australian aspect 
which distinguishes many Negrito skulls, while others 
tend rather towards forms common in the Polynesian 
islands. 

In civilization, New Caledonia exhibits an advance 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 191 

upon Tasmania, and farther north, there is a still 
greater improvement. But the bows and arrows, the 
perched houses, the outrigger canoes, the habits of betel- 
chewing and of kawa-drinking, which abound more or 
less among the northern ^N'egritos, are probably to be 
regarded not as the products of an indigenous civiliza- 
tion, but merely as indications of the extent to which 
foreign influences have modified the primitive social 
state of these people. 

From Tasmania or Xew Caledonia, to 'New Zealand 
or Tongataboo, is again but a brief voyage : but it brings 
about a still more notable change in the aspect of the 
indigenous population than that effected by the passage 
of Bass's Straits. Instead of being chocolate-coloured 
people, the Maories and Tongans are light brown ; in- 
stead of woolly, they have straight, or wavy, black hair. 
And if from ^N'ew Zealand, we travel some 5,000 miles 
east to Easter Island ; and from Easter Island, for as 
great a distance north-west, to the Sandwich Islands; 
and thence 7,000 miles, westward and southward, to 
Sumatra ; and even across the Indian Ocean, into the 
interior of Madagascar, we shall everywhere meet with 
people whose hair is straight or wavy, and whose skins 
exhibit various shades of brown. These are the Polyne- 
sians, Micronesians, Indonesians, whom Latham has 
grouped together under the common title of Amphine- 

SIAjNTS. 

The cranial characters of these people, as of the 
[N'egritos, are less constant than those of their skin and 
hair. The Maori has a long skull; the Sandwich Is- 
lander a broad skull. Some, like these, have strong 
brow ridges; others like the Dayaks and many Poly- 
nesians, have hardly any nasal indentation. It is only 
in the westernmost parts of their area that the Amphine- 



192 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

sian nations know anything about bows and. arrows as 
weapons, or are acquainted with the use of metals or 
with pottery. Everywhere they cultivate the ground, 
construct houses, and skilfully build and manage out- 
rigger, or double, canoes ; while, almost everywhere, 
they use some kind of fabric for clothing. 

Between Easter Island, or the Sandwich Islands, and 
any part of the American coast is a much wider interval 
than that between Tasmania and 'New Zealand, but the 
ethnological interval between the American and the 
Polynesian is less than that between either of the pre- 
viously named stocks. 

The typical American has straight black hair and 
dark eyes, his skin exhibiting various shades of reddish 
or yellowish brown, sometimes inclining to olive. The 
face is broad and scantily bearded ; the skull wide and 
high. Such people extend from Patagonia to Mexico, 
and much farther north along the west coast. In the 
main a race of hunters, they had nevertheless, at the 
time of the discovery of the Americas, attained a re- 
markable degree of civilization in some localities. ' They 
had domesticated ruminants, and not only practised 
agriculture, but had learned the value of irrigation. 
They manufactured texile fabrics, were masters of the 
potter's art, and knew how to erect massive buildings of 
stone. They understood the working of the precious, 
though not of the useful, metals ;" and had even attained 
to a rude kind of hieroglyphic, or picture, writing. The 
Americans not only employ the bow and arrow, but, like 
some Amphinesians, the blow-pipe, as offensive weap- 
ons : but I am not aware that the outrigger canoe has 
ever been observed among them. 

[* With the exception of copper and bronzs, — 1894.] 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 193 

I have reason to suspect that some of the Fuegian 
tribes differ cranially from the typical Americans;" 
and the Northern and Eastern American tribes have 
longer skulls than their Southern compatriots. But the 
Esquimaux^ who roam on the desolate and ice-bound 
coast of Arctic i^merica, certainly present us with a new 
stock. The Esquimaux (among whom the Greenlanders 
are included)^ in fact, though they share the straight 
Kack hair of the proper Americans, are generally a 
duller complexioned, shorter, and a more squat people, 
and they have still more prominent cheek-bones. But 
the circumstance which most completely separates them 
from the typical Americans, is the form of their skulls, 
which instead of being broad, high, and truncated be- 
hind, are eminently long, usually low^, and prolonged 
backwards. These Hyperborean people clothe them- 
selves in skins, know nothing of pottery, and hardly 
anything of metals. Dependent for existence upon the 
produce of the chase, the seal and the whale are to them 
what the cocoa-nut tree and the plantain are to the sav- 
ages of more genial climates. Xot only are those ani- 
mals meat and raiment, but they are canoes, sledges, 
weapons, tools, windows, and fire ; while they support 
the dog, who is the indispensable ally and beast of bur- 
den of the Esquimaux. 

It is admitted that the Tchuktchi, on the eastern side 
of Behring's Straits, are, in all essential respects, Esqui- 
maux; and I do not know that there is any satisfactory 
evidence to show that the Tunguses and Samoiedes do 
not essenitally share the same physical characters. 
Southward, there are indications of Esquimaux charac- 

[* A suspicion subsequently verified. See a memoir on 
American Skulls, Journal of Anatomy and Physiology. Vol. 
16.— 1894.] 

i8 



194 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

ters among the Japanese, and it is possible that their 
influence may be traced yet further. 

However this may be. Eastern Asia, from Mant- 
chouria to Siam, Thibet, and Northern Hindostan, is 
continuously inhabited by men, usually of short stature, 
with skins varying in colour from yellow to olive ; with 
broad cheek-bones and faces that, ovvdng to the insigni- 
ficance of the nose, are exceedingly flat ; and with small, 
obliquely-set^ black eyes and straight black hair, which 
sometimes attains a very great length upon the scalp, 
but is always scanty upon the face and body. The skull, 
never much elongated, is, generally, remarkably broad 
and rounded, with hardly an}^ nasal depression, and 
but slight, if any, projection of the jaws. Many of 
these people, from wdiom the old name of Mongolians 
may be retained, are nomades; others, as the Chinese, 
have attained a remarkable and apparently indigenous 
civilization, only surpassed by that of Europe. 

At the north-western extremity of Europe the Lapps 
repeat the characters of the Eastern Asiatics. Between 
these extreme points, the Mongolian stock is not continu- 
ous, but is represented by a chain of more or less iso- 
lated tribes, who pass under the name of Calmucks and 
Tartars, and form Mongolian islands, as it were, in the 
midst of an ocean of other people. 

The waves of this ocean are the nations for whom, in 
order to avoid the endless confusion produced by our 
present half-physical, half-philological classification, I 
shall use a new name — Xanthociiroi — indicating that 
they are '' yellow^ '^ haired and " pale '' in complexion. 
The Chinese historians of the Han dvnaslv, writini>' iii 



[* The obliquity, it must be recollected, is not in the posi- 
tion of the eyeball but arises from the arrangement of the 
skin in the neighbourhood of the eyelids. — 1894.] 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 195 

tlie third century before our era, describe, with much 
minuteness, certain numerous and powerful barbarians 
Avith " yellow hair, green eyes, and prominent noses," 
who, the black-haired, skew-eyed, and flat-nosed annal- 
ists remark in passing, are " just like the apes from 
whom they are descended." These people held, in 
force, the upper waters of the Yenisei, and thence under 
various names stretched southward to Thibet and Kash- 
gar. Fair-haired and blue-eyed northern enemies were 
no less known to the ancient Hindoos, to the Persians, 
and to the Egyptians, on the south and west of the 
great central Asiatic area ; while the testimony of all 
European antiquity is to the effect that, before and 
since the period in question, there lay beyond the Dan- 
ube, the Rhine, and the Seine, a vast and dangerous 
yellow or red-haired, fair-skinned,- blue-eyed popula- 
tion. Whether the disturbers of the marches of the 
Roman Empire were called Gauls or Germans, Goths, 
Alans, or Scythians, one thing seems certain, that until 
the invasion of the TLuns, they were largely tall, fair, 
blue-eyed men. 

If any one should think fit to assume that, in the year 
100 B. c, there was one continuous Xanthochroic popu- 
lation from the Rhine to the Yenisei, and from the Ural 
mountains to the Hindoo Koosh, I know not that any 
evidence exists by which that position could be upset, 
while the existing state of things is rather in its favour 
than otherwise. For the Scandinavians, the Germans, 
the Slavonian and the Finnish tribes, to a great extent ; 
some of the inhabitants of Greece, many Turks, some 
Kirghis, and some Mantchous, the Ossetes in the Cau- 
casus, the Siahposh, the Rohillas, are at the present day 
fair, yellow or red haired, and blue-eyed ; and the inter- 
polation of tribes of Mongolian hair and complexion, as 



1§6 MaM'S plage m NAftJRfi; 

far west as the Caspian Steppes and the Crimea, might 
justly be accounted for by those subsequent westward 
irruptions of the Mongoljan stock, of which history fur- 
nishes abundant testimony. The furthermost limit of 
the Xanthochroi north-westward is Iceland and the 
British Isles; south-westward^ they are traceable at in- 
tervals through Syria and the Berber country^ ending 
in the Canary Islands. The cranial characters of the 
Xanthochroi are not, at present, strictly definable. The 
Scandinavians are certainly long-headed ; but many 
Germans, the Swiss so far as they are Germanized, the 
Slavonians, the Fins, and the Turks, are short-headed. 
What were the cranial characters of the ancient 
" Usuns " and " Tin^-linps '' of the vallev of the Yeni- 
sei is unknown. 

West and south of the area occupied by the chief 
mass of the Xanthochroi, and north of the Sahara, is a 
broad belt of land, shaped like a >- . Between the forks 
of the Y lies the Mediterranean ; the stem of it is 
Arabia. The stem is bathed by the Indian Ocean, the 
western ends of the forks by the Atlantic. The majori- 
ty of the people inhabiting the area thus roughly defined 
have, like the Xanthochroi, prominent noses, pale skins 
and wavy hair, with abundant beards ; but, unlike them, 
the hair is black or dark and the eyes usually so. They 
may thence be called the Melaxociiroi. Such people 
are found in the British Islands, in Western and South- 
ern Gaul, in Spain, in Italy south of the Po, in parts 
of Greece, in Syria and Arabia, stretching as far north- 
ward and eastward as the Caucasus and Persia. They 
are the chief inhabitants of Africa north of the Sahara, 
and, like the Xanthochroi, they end in the Canary Is- 
lands. They are known as Kelts, Iberians, Etruscans, 
Romans, Pelasgians, Berbers, Semites. The majority 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 19Y 

of them are longheaded, and of smaller stature than the 
Xanthochroi."^ It is needless to remark upon the civi- 
lisation of these two great stocks. With them has orig- 
inated everything that is highest in science, in art, in 
law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions. In their 
hands, at the present moment, lies the order of the social 
^vorld, and to them its progress is committed. 

South of the Atlas, and of the Great Desert, Middle 
Africa exhibits a new tvpe of humanity in the E^egro^ 
with his dark skin, woolly hair, projecting jaws, and 
thick lips. As a rule, the skull of the iNTegro is remark- 
ably long; it rarely approaches the broad type, and 
never exhibits the roundness of the Mongolian. A culti- 
vator of the ground, and dwelling in villages ; a maker 
of pottery, and a worker in the useful as well as the 
ornamental metals ; employing the bow and arrow as 
vrell as the spear, the typical negro stands high in point 
of civilization above the Australian. 

Resembling the Xegroes in cranial characters, the 
BusHMEJ^ of South Africa differ from them in their 
yellowish brown skins, their tufted hair, their remark- 
ably small stature, and their tendency to fatty and other 
integumentary outgrowths ; nor is the wonderful click 
with which their speech is interspersed to be overlooked 
in enumerating the physical characteristics of this 
strange joeople. 

The so-called ^^ Dravidian " populations of Southern 
Hindostan lead us back, j^hysically as well as geographi- 
cally, towards the Australians ; f while the diminutive 

[* See the Essay on tlie Aryan Question, in this volume, 
for some qualifications of these statements necessitated by fur- 
ther knowledge. — 1894.] 

[f Of the affinities of these stocks I think there can be no 
doubt. I was formerly inclined to believe that the ancient 



198 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

MiNCOPiES of the Andaman Islands lie midway be- 
tween the E'egro and N^egrito races, and, as Mr. Busk 
has pointed out, occasionally present the rare combina- 
tion of brachycephaly, or short-headedness, with woolly 
hair. 

In the preceding progress along the outskirts of the 
habitable world, eleven readily distinguishable stocks, 
or pai'sistent modifications, of mankind, have been rec- 
ognized. I have purposely omitted such people as the 
Abyssinians and the Hindoos of the valleys of the 
Ganges and Indus, who there is every reason to believe 
result from the intermixture of distinct stocks. Per- 
haps I ought for like reasons, to have ignored the Min- 
copies. But I do not pretend that my enumeration is 
complete or, in any sense, perfect. It is enough for my 
purpose if it be admitted (and I think it cannot be^ 
denied) that those which I have mentioned exist, are 
well marked, and occupy the greater part of the habita- 
ble globe. 

In attempting to classify these persistent modifica- 
tions after the manner of naturalists, the first circum- 
stance that attracts one's attention is the broad contrast 
betw^een the people with straight and wavy hair, and 
those with crisp, Avoolly, or tufted hair. Bory de St. 
Vincent, noting this fundamental distinction, divided 
mankind accordingly into the two primary groups of 



Egyptian was the highest term in an ascending series: Aus- 
tralian — Dravidian — Egyptian of allied stocks. And I believe 
still that there is a good deal to be said for that hypothesis. 
One of the most interesting problems at present is the relation 
of the praesem.itic population of Babylonia to the Dravidians, 
on the one hand, and the Old Egyptian on the other. Only one 
point appears to me to be quite clear, if the statues of Tell 
Loh represent these people; that there is not a trace of Mon- 
golian affinity about them. — 1894.] 



METHOD.'^ AND RESULTS OF ETSKOLOGY. 190 

Leiotriclii and Ulotriclvi, — terms which are open to crit- 
icism, but which I adopt in the accompanying table, 
because they have been used. It is better for science to 
accept a faulty name Avhich has the merit of existence, 
than to burthen it with a faultless newly invented one. 

Leiotrichi. Ulotrichi. 



Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Dolichocephali. Brachycepliali. 
Leucous, 

.... Xanthochroi .... 
Leucomelanous. 

.... Melanochroi .... 
Xanthomelanous. 

Esquimaux. Mongolians, Bushmen, 
Am.phinesians. 
Americans. 
Melanous. 

Australians. 

Negroes. Mincopies (?) 

Negritos. 

"^^"^The names of the stocks known only since the fifteenth 
century are put into italics. If the " Skriilings " of the Norse 
discoverers of America were Esquimaux, Europeans hecame 
acquainted ivith the latter six or seven centuries earlier. 

Under each of these divisions are two columns, one 
for the Brachycephali, or short heads, and one for the 
Dolichocephali,* or long heads. Again, each column 
is subdivided transversely into four compartments, one 
for the '^ leucous," people with fair complexions and 
yellow or red hair ; one for the '' leucomelanous," with 
dark hair and pale skins ; one for the '^ xanthomela- 
nous," with black hair and yellow, brown, or olive 
skins ; and one for the ^^ melanous," with black hair and 
dark brown or blackish skins. 



* Skulls, the transverse diameter of which is more than 
eight-tenths the long diameter, are short; those which have 
the transverse diameter less than eight-tenths the longitudinal, 
are long. 



200 MAN*S PLACE IN NATURE. 

It is curious to observe that almost all the woolly- 
haired people are also long-headed; while among the 
straight-haired nations broad heads preponderate, and 
only two stocks, the Esquimaux and the Australians, 
are exclusively long-headed. 

One of the acutest and most original of ethnologists, 
Desmoulins, originated the idea, which has subsequently 
been fully developed by Agassiz, that the distribution 
of the persistent modifications of man is governed by the 
same laws as that of other animals, and that both fall 
into the same great distributional provinces. Thus, Aus- 
tralia, America, south of Mexico ; the Arctic regions ; 
Europe, Syria, Arabia, and E^orth Africa, taken to- 
gether, are each regions eminently characterised by the 
nature of their animal and vegetable populations, and 
each, as we have seen, has its peculiar and characteristic 
form of man. But it may be doubted whether the par- 
allel thus drawn will hold good strictly, and in all cases. 
The Tasmanian Fauna and Flora are essentially Aus- 
tralian, and the like is true, to a less extent, of many, 
if not of all, the Papuan islands; but the l^egritos who 
inhabit these islands are strikingly different from the 
Australians. Again, the differences between the Mon- 
golians and the Xanthochroi are out of all proportion 
greater than those between the Faunas and Florae of 
Central and Eastern Asia. But Avhatever the difficulties 
in the Avay of the detailed application of this comparison 
of the distribution of men with that of animals, it is 
well worthy of being borne in mind, and carried as far 
as it will go. 

Apart from all speculation, a very curious fact re- 
garding the distribution of the persistent modifications 
of mankind becomes apparent on inspecting an Ethnol- 
ogical chart, projected in such a manner that the Pacific 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 201 

Ocean occupies its centre. Such a chart exhibits an 
Australian area occupied by dark smooth-haired people, 
separated by an incomplete inner zone of dark woolly- 
haired ZSTegritoes and Xegroes, from an outer zone of 
comparatively pale and smooth-haired men, occupying 
the Americas, and nearly all Asia" and N'orth Africaf 

Such is a brief sketch of the characters and distribu- 
tion of the persistent modifications, or stocks, of man- 
kind at the present day. If we seek for direct evidence 
of how long this state of things has lasted, we shall find 
little enough, and that little far from satisfactory. Of 
the eleven different stocks enumerated, seven have been 
knowm to us for less than 400 years ; and of these seven 
not one possessed a fragment of written history at the 
time it came into contact with European civilization. 
The other four — theXegroes, Mongolians, Xanthochroij 
and Melanochroi — have always existed in some of the 
localities in which they are now found, nor do the 
negroes ever seem to have voluntarily travelled beyond 
the limits of their j)resent area. But ancient history is 
in a great measure the record of the mutual encroach- 
ments of the other three stocks. 

On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little 
change has been effected by these mutual invasions and 
intermixtures. As at the present time, so at the dawn 
of history, the Melanochroi fringed the Atlantic and 
the Mediterranean ; the Xanthochroi occujDied most of 
Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and 
Central Asia ; while Mongolians held the extreme east 
of the Old World. So far as history teaches us, the 



[t Egypt excepted.— 1894.] 

[* Hindoostan excepted,— 1894,1 



202 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

populations of Europe, Asia and Africa were, twenty"^ 
centuries ago, just what they are now, in their broad 
features and general distribution. 

The evidence yielded by Archseology is not very defin- 
ite, but so far as it goes, it is to much the same effect. 
The mound builders of Central America seem to have 
had the characteristic short and broad head of the mod- 
ern inhabitants of that continent. The tumuli and 
tombs of Ancient Scandinavia, of pre-Roman Britain, 
of Gaul, of Switzerland, reveal two types of skull — a 
broad and a long — of which, in Scandinavia, the broad 
seems to have belonged to the older stock, while the 
reverse was probably the case in Britain, and certainly 
in Svvdtzerland. It has been assumed that the broad- 
skulled people of ancient Scandinavia were Lapps ; but 
there is no proof of the fact, and they may have been, 
like the broad-skulled Swiss and Germans, Xanthochroi. 
One of the greatest of ethnological difficulties is to know 
where the modern Swedes, ISTorsemen, and Saxons got 
their long heads, as all their neighbours. Fins, Lapps, 
Slavonians, and South Germans, are broad-headed. 
Again, who were the small-Iiandedf long-headed people 
of the '^ bronze epoch," and what has become of the 
infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi ? 

At present Palaeontology yields no safe data to the 
ethnologist. We know absolutely nothing of the ethnol- 
ogical characters of the men of Abbeville and Hoxne; 
but must be content with the demonstration, in itself 
of immense value, that Man existed in Western Europe 

[* We may now safely say thirty or forty. — 1894.] 
[t Supposed to be small-handed from the small handles of 
their bronze swords. But I observe in the Assyrian sculp- 
tures the same small handles, while the hands are by no means 
small. How did the Assyrians use their swords? So far as 
I know thrusting alone is represented, — 1894.] 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 203 

when its physical condition was widely different from 
what it is now, and when animals existed, which, though 
they belong to what is, property speaking, the present 
order of things, have long been extinct. Beyond tho 
limits of a fraction of Europe, Palteontology tells us 
nothing of man or of his works. 

To sum up our knowledge of the ethnological past of 
man ; so far as the light is bright, it shows him substan- 
tially as he is now ; and, when it grows dim, it permits 
us to see no sign that he was other than he is now. 

It is a general belief that men of different stocks dif- 
fer as much physiologically as they do morphologically ; 
but it is very hard to prove, in any particular case, how 
much of a supposed national characteristic is due to in- 
herent physiological peculiarities, and how much to the 
influence of circumstances. There is much evidence to 
show, however, that some stocks enjoy a partial or com- 
plete immunity from diseases which destroy, or deci- 
mate, others. Thus there seems good ground for the 
belief that Xegroes are remarkably exempt from yellow 
fever; and that, among Europeans, the melanochroic 
people are less obnoxious to its ravages than the xan- 
thochroic. But many writers, not content with physio- 
logical differences of this kind, undertake to prove the 
existence of others of far greater moment; and, indeed, 
to show that certain stocks of mankind exhibit, more or 
less distinctly, the physiological characters of true 
species. Unions between these stocks, and still more 
between the half-breeds arising from their mixture, are 
affirmed to be either infertile, or less fertile than those 
which take place between males and females of either 
stock under the same circumstances. Some go so far 
as to assert that no mixed breeds of mankind can main- 
tain themselves without the assistance of one or other of 



204: MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

the parent stocks^ and that, conseqnentlv, they must 
inevitably be obliterated in the long run. 

Here, again, it is exceedingly difficult to obtain trust- 
worthy evidence and to free the effects of the pure physi- 
ological experiment from adventitious influences. The 
only trial which, by a strange chance, was kept clear 
of all such influences — the only instance in which two 
distinct stocks of mankind were crossed, and their prog- 
eny intermarried without any admixture from without 
— is the famous case of the Pitcairn Islanders, who w^ere 
the progeny of Bligh's English sailors by Tahitian 
women. The results of this experiment, as everybody 
knows, are dead against those who maintain the doctrine 
of human hybridity, seeing that the Pitcairn Islanders, 
even though they necessarily contracted consanguineous 
marriages, throve and multiplied exceedingly. 

But those who are disposed to believe in this doctrine 
should study the evidence brought forward in its sup- 
port by M. Broca, its latest and ablest advocate, and 
comjDare this evidence with that which the botanists, as 
represented by a Gaertner or by a Darwin, think it 
indispensable to obtain before they will admit the infer- 
tility of crosses between two allied kinds of plants. 
They will then, I think, be satisfied that the doctrine 
in question rests upon a very unsafe foundation ; that 
the facts adduced in its support are capable of many 
other interpretations ; and, indeed, that from the very 
nature of the case, demonstrative evidence one way or 
the other is almost unattainable. A lyriori, I should be 
disposed to expect a certain amount of infertility be; 
tween some of the extreme modifications of mankind ; 
and still more between the offsprings of their intermix- 
ture. A posteriori, I cannot discover any satisfactory 
proof that such infertility exists. 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 205 

From the facts of ethnology I now turn to the theories 
and speculations of ethnologists, which have been de- 
vised to explain these facts, and to furnish satisfactory 
answers to the inquiry — what conditions have deter- 
mined the existence of the persistent modifications of 
mankind, and have caused their distribution to be what 
it is? 

These speculations may be grouped under three 
heads : firstly, the Monogenist hypotheses ; secondly. 
those of the Polygenists; and thirdly, that which v^ould 
result from a simple application of Darwinian prin- 
ciples to mankind. 

According to the Monogenists, all mankind have 
sprung from a single pair, whose multitudinous progeny 
spread themselves over the world, such as it now is, and 
became modified into the forms we meet with in the 
various regions of the earth, by the effect of the climatal 
and other conditions to which they were subjected. 

The advocates of this hypothesis are divisble into 
several schools. There are those who represent the most 
numerous, respectable, and would-be orthodox of the 
public, and are what may be called '' Adamites," pure 
and simple. They believe that Adam was made out 
of earth somewhere in x\sia, about six thousand years 
ago; that Eve was modelled from one of his ribs; and 
that the progeny of these two having been reduced to 
the eight persons who were landed on the summit of 
Mount Ararat after an universal deluge, all the nations 
of the earth have proceeded from these last, have mi- 
grated to their present localities, and have become con- 
verted into E^egroes, Australians, Mongolians, &c., 
within that time. Five-sixths of the j)ublic are taught 
this Adamitic Monogenism, as if it were an established 
truth, and believe it. I do not ; and I am not acquainted 



S06 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

with any man of science, or duly instructed person, who 
does. . 

A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much 
attention, attempts to hold a place midway between the 
Adamites and a third division, who take up a purely 
scientific position, and require to be dealt with accord- 
ingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks 
Linnseus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and 
many distinguished living ethnologists. 

These " Rational Monogenists,'' or, at any rate, the 
more modern among them, hold, firstly, that the present 
condition of the earth has existed for untold ages; 
secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond the ken of 
Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere be- 
tv/een the Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh ; thirdly, 
that he might have migrated thence to all parts of the 
inhabited world, seeing that none of them are unat- 
tainable from some other inhabited part, by men pro- 
vided with only such means of transport as savages are 
known to possess and must have invented ; fourthly, 
that the operation of the existing diversities of climate 
and other conditions upon people so migrating, is suffi- 
cient to account for all the diversities of mankind. 

Of the truth of the first of these propositions no com- 
petent judge now entertains any doubt. The second is 
more open to discussion ; for, in these latter days, many 
question the special creation of man : and even if his 
special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a 
reason why he should have been created in Asia rather 
than anywhere else. Of all the odd myths that have^ 
arisen in the scientific world, the "' Caucasian mystery,^' 
invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. 
A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his 
collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 207 

human skulls, from which all others might be regarded 
as deviations ; and out of this, by some strange intellec- 
tual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian 
man is the prototypic ^' Adamic " man, and his country 
the primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most 
curious thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, 
after all, is not a skull of average form, but distinctly 
belongs to the brachycephalic group. 

With the third proposition I am quite disposed to 
agree, though it must be recollected that it is one thing 
to allow that a given migration is jDOssible, and another 
to admit there is good reason to believe it has really 
taken place. 

But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the 
fourth proposition; and I doubt if it would ever liave 
obtained its general currency except for the circum- 
stance that fair Europeans are very readily tanned and 
embrowned by the sun. Yet I am not aware that there 
is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus 
effected can become hereditary, any more than that the 
enlarged livers, which plague our countrymen in India, 
can be transmitted ; while there is very strong evidence 
to the contrary. J^ot only, in fact, are there such cases 
as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have 
remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, 
but which are open to the objection that they may Iiave 
received infusions of fresh European blood ; but there 
is the broad fact, that not a single indigenous jSTegro 
exists either in the great alluvial plains of tropical 
South America, or in. the exposed islands of the Polyc- 
sian Archipelago, or among the populations of equa- 
torial Borneo or Sumatra. Xo satisfactory explanation 
of these obvious difficulties has been offered by the ad- 
vocates of the ' direct influence of conditions, xind as 



208 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

for the more important modifications observed in the 
structure of the brain^ and in the form of the skull^ no 
one has ever pretended to show in what way they can 
be effected directly by climate. 

It is here, in fact, that the strength of the Polygen- 
ists, or those who maintain that men primitively arose, 
not from one, but from many stocks, lies. Show us, 
they say to the Monogenists, a single case in which the 
characters of a human stock have been essentially modi- 
fied without its being demonstrable, or, at least highly 
probable, that there has been intermixture of blood with 
some foreign stock. Bring forward any instance in 
which a part of the world, formerly inhabited by one 
stock, is now the dwelling-place of another, and we will 
prove the change to be the result of migration, or of 
intermixture, and not of modification of character by 
climatic influences. Finally, prove to us that the evi- 
dence in favour of the specific distinctness of many ani- 
mals, admitted to be distinct species by all zoologists, is 
a whit better than that upon which we maintain the 
specific distinctness of men. 

If presenting unanswerable objections to your adver- 
sary were the same thing as proving your own case, the 
Polygenists would be in a fair way towards victory ; but, 
unfortunately, as I have already observed, they have as 
yet completely failed to adduce satisfactory positive 
proof of the specific diversity of mankind. Like the 
Monogenists, the Polygenists are of several sects; some 
imagine that their assumed species of mankind were 
created where we find them — the African in Africa,^ 
and the Australian in Australia, along with the other 
animals of their distributional province; others con- 
ceive that each species of man has resulted from the 
modification of some antecedent species of ape — the 



Methods and results op ethnology. 209 

American from the broad-nosed Simians of the Xew 
World, the African from the Troglodytic stock, the 
Mongolian from the Orangs. 

The first hypothesis is hardly likely to win much 
favour. The whole tendency of modern science is to 
thrust the origination of things further and further into 
the background; and the chief philosophical objection 
to Adam being, not his oneness, but the hypothesis o£ 
his special creation ; the multiplication of that objection 
tenfold is, whatever it may look, an increase, instead of 
a diminution, of the difficulties of the case. And, as to 
the second alternative, it may safely be affirmed that,. 
even if the differences between men are specific, they 
are so small, that the assumption of more than one prim- 
itive stock for all is altogether superfluous. Surely no 
one can now be found to assert that any two stocks of 
mankind difl^er as much as a chimpanzee and an orang 
do; still less that they are as unlike as either of these 
is to any [NTew World Simian ! 

Lastly, the granting of the Polygenist premises does 
not, in the slightest degree, necessitate the Polygenist 
conclusion. Admit that Negroes and Australians, 
jSTegritos and Mongols are distinct species, or distinct 
genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect con- 
sistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even 
believe in Adam and Eve as the primseval parents of all 
mankind. 

It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery: it is he 
w^ho, coming forward in the guise of an eclectic philo- 
sopher, presents his doctrine as the key to ethnology, 
and as reconciling and combining all that is good in the 
Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools. It is true that 
Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his 
views to ethnology ; but even he who '' runs and reads '' 
14 



210 MAN'S PLACE IN NATtJIifi. 

the '^ Origin of Species " can hardly fail to do so ; and, 
furthermore, Mr. Wallace and M. Pouchet have recent- 
ly treated of ethnological questions from this point of 
view. Let me, in conclusion^ add my own contribution 
to the same store. 

I assume Man to have arisen in the manner which I 
have discussed elsewhere, and probably, though by no 
means necessarily, in one locality. Whether he arose 
singly, or a number of examples appeared contemporan- 
eously, is also an open question for the believer in the 
production of species by the gradual modification of pre- 
existing ones. At wdiat epoch of the world's history this 
took place, again, w^e have no evidence whatever. It 
may have been in the older tertiary, or earlier ; but what 
is most important to remember is, that the discoveries 
of late years have proved that man inhabited Western 
Europe, at any rate, before the occurrence of those great 
j)hysical changes which have given Europe its present 
aspect. And as the same evidence shows that man was 
the contemporary of animals which are now extinct, it 
is not too much to assume that his existence dates back 
at least as far as that of our present Fauna and Flora, 
or before the epoch of the drift. 

But if this be true, it is somewhat startling to reflect 
upon the prodigious changes which have taken place in 
the physical geography of this planet since man has 
been an occupant of it. 

During that period the greater part of the British 
islands, of Central Europe, of ^N'orthern Asia, have been 
submerged beneath the sea and raised up again. So has 
the great desert of Sahara, which occupies the major 
part of Northern Africa." The Caspian and the Aral 

[* Later investigations tend to show that only a small part 
of the Sahara has been submerged. — 1894.] 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 211 

seas have been one, and their united waters have prob- 
ably communicated with both the x\rctic and the Medi- 
terranean oceans.^ The greater part of I^orth America 
has been under water, and has emerged. It is highly 
probable that a large part of the Malayan Archipelago 
has sunk, and that its primitive continuity with Asia 
has been destroyed. Over the great Polynesian area 
subsidence has taken place to the extent of many thou- 
sands of feet — subsidence of so vast a' character, in fact, 
that if a continent like Asia had once occupied the area 
of the Pacific, the peaks of its mountains would now 
show not more numerous than the islands of the Poly- 
nesian Archipelago, f 

What lands may have been thickly populated for 
untold ages, and subsequently have disappeared and left 
no sign above the waters, it is of course impossible for 
us to say; but unless we are to make the wholly unjusti- 
fiable assumption that no dry land rose elsewhere when 
our present dry land sank, there must be half-a-dozen 
Atlantises beneath the waves of the various oceans of 
the world. But if the regions which have undergone 
these slow and gradual, but immense alterations, were 
wholly or in part inhabited before the changes I have 
indicated began — and it is more probable that they were 
than that they were not — what a wonderfully efficient 
" Emigration Board " must have been at work all over 
the world long before canoes, or even rafts, were in- 
vented ; and before men were impelled to wander by any 
desire nobler or stronger than hunger. And as these 



[* With reference to certain reclamations that have been 
made a propos of a speculation set forth in the essay on the 
Aryan Question (infra), I draw attention to the fact that this 
passag:e was written twenty-nine years ago. — 1894.] 

[t The occurrence of this extensive subsidence is disputed. 
—1894.] 



il9 MAN'S PLACE IN NATtlRE. 

rude and primitive families were thrust, in the course 
of long series of generations, from land to land, impelled 
by encroachments of sea or of marsh, or bv severity of 
summer heat or winter cold, to change their positions, 
what opportunities must have been offered for the play 
of natural selection, in preserving one family variation 
and destroying another ! 

Suppose, for example, that some families of a horde 
which had reached a land charged with the seeds of 
yellow fever, varied in the direction of woolliness of 
hair and darkness of skin. Then, if it be true that these 
physical characters are accompanied by comparative or 
absolute exemptions from that scourge, the inevitable 
tendency would be to the preservation and multiplica- 
tion of the darker and woollier families, and the elimi- 
nation of the whiter and smoother haired. In fact, by 
the operation of causes precisely similar to those which, 
in the famous instance cited by Mr. Darwin, have given 
rise to a race of black pigs in the forests of Louisiana, a 
negro stock would eventually people the region."^' 
Again, how often, by such physical changes, must a 
stock have been isolated from all others for innumerable 
generations, and have found ample time for the heredi- 
tary hardening of its special peculiarities into the en- 
during characters of a persistent modification. 

Xor, if it be true that the j)hysiological differences of 
species may be produced by variation and natural selec- 



[* Mr. Pearson, in his very interesting work On National 
Life and Character, justly dwells upon the obstacles to the 
existence of the white races within the Tropics. There is, 
however, this point to be considered, that the fevers to which 
the white men succumb are probably caused by microbes; and 
that modern therapeutic science is daily teaching us more and 
more about the ways of obtaining immunity from or alleviat- 
ing these attacks. What would become of black competition 
if fever "vaccination" proved effectual? — 1894. 



METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 213 

tion, as Mr. Darwin supposes, would it be at all aston- 
isliing, if J in some of these separated stocks, the process 
of differentiation should have gone so far as to give rise 
to the phenomena of hybridity. In the face of the over- 
whelming evidence in favour of the unity of the origin 
of mankind afforded by anatomical considerations, satis- 
factory proof of the existence of any degree of sterility 
in the unions of members of two of the '' persistent 
modifications " of mankind, might w^ell be appealed to 
by Mr. Darwin as crucial evidence of the truth of his 
views regarding the origin of species in general. 



214 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



V. 



ON SOME FIXED POINTS IN BKITISH ETH- 
NOLOGY. 

[1871.] 

Iisr view of the many discussions to which the com- 
plicated problems offered by the ethnology of the Brit- 
ish Islands have given rise, it may be useful to attempt 
to pick out, from amidst the confused masses of asser- 
tion and of inference, those propositions which appear 
to rest upon a secure foundation, and to state the evi- 
dence by which they are supported. Such is the pur- 
pose of the present paper. 

Some of these well-based propositions relate to the 
physical characters of the people of Britain and their 
neighbours; while others concern the languages which 
they spoke. I shall deal, in the first place, with the 
physical questions. 

I. Eighteen hundred years ago the populatio7i of 
Britain comprised people of two types of complexion — 
the one fair, and the other dark. The dark people re- 
sembled the Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair people 
were like the Belgic Gauls. 

The chief direct evidence of the truth of this proposi- 
tion is the well-known passage of Tacitus : — 

" Ceterum Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indi- 



BmTlSH ETHNOLOGY. ^15 

genae an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertiim. Hab- 
itus corporum varii: atque ex eo argumenta: namque rutilctj 
Caledoniam habitantium com«, magni artus, Germanicam 
originem asseverant. Silurum colorati vultus et torti plerum- 
que crines, et posita contra Hispania, Iberos veteres traje- 
cisse, easque sedes occupasse, fidem faciimt. Proximi Gallis 
et similes sunt; seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus 
in diversa terris, positio coeli corporibus habitum dedit. In 
universura tamen aestimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupasse, 
credibile est; eorum sacra deprehendas, superstitionum per- 
suasione; sermo baud multum diversus." * 

This passage, it will be observed, contains statements 
as to facts, and certain conclusions deduced from these 
facts. The matters of fact asserted are: firstly, that 
the inhabitants of Britain exhibit much diversity in 
their physical characters; secondly, that the Caledon- 
ians are red-haired and large-limbed, like the Germans ; 
thirdly, that the Silures have curly hair and dark com- 
plexions, like the people of Spain ; fourthly, that the 
British people nearest Gaul resemble the " Galli." 

Tacitus, therefore, states positively what the Cale- 
donians and Silures were like ; but the interpretation of 
what he says about the other Britons must depend u]3on 
what we learn from other sources as to the characters 
of these " Galli." Here the testimony of '' divus 
Julius " comes in with great force and appropriateness. 
Caesar writes: — 

" Britannise pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in 
insula ipsi memoria proditum dicunt: marituma pars ab iis, 
qui praedEe ac belli inferendi causa ex Belgio transierant; qui 
omnes fere iis nominibus civitatum appellantur quibus orti 
ex civitatibus eo pervenerunt, et bello inlato ibi permanserunt 
atque agros colere coeperunt," t 

From these passages it is obvious that, in the opinion 
of Cfesar and Tacitus, the southern Britons resembled 
the northern Gauls, and especially the Belgse; and the 

* Tacitus Agricola, c. 11. 
t De Bello Gallico, v. 12, 



216 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

evidence of Strabo is decisive as to the characters in 
which the two people resembled one another : '^ The men 
[of Britain] are taller than the Kelts, with hair less 
yellow ; they are slighter in their persons." ^ 

The evidence adduced appears to leave no reasonable 
ground for doubting that, at the time of the Roman 
conquest, Britain contained people of two types, the 
one dark and the other fair complexioned, and that 
there was a certain difference between the latter in the 
north and in the south of Britain : the northern folk 
being, in the judgment of Tacitus, or, more properly, 
according to the information he had received from Agri- 
cola and others, more similar to the Germans than the 
latter. As to the distribution of these stocks, all that 
is clear is, that the dark people were predominant in 
certain parts of the west of the southern half of Britain, 
while the fair stock appears to have furnished the chief 
elements of the population elsewhere. 

^0 ancient writer troubled himself with measuring 
skulls, and therefore there is no direct evidence as to the 
cranial characters of the fair and the dark stocks. The 
indirect evidence is not very satisfactory. The tumuli 
of Britain of pre-Roman date have yielded two extreme- 
ly different forms of skud, the one broad and the other 
long; and the same variety has been observed in the 
skulls of the ancient Gauls, f The suggestion is obvious 
that the one form of skull may have been associated 
with the fair, and the other with the dark, complexion. 
But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by 
the reflection that the extremes of long and shortdiead- 
edness are to be met with among the fair inhabitants of 

* The Geography of Strabo. Translated by Hamilton and 
Falconer, v. 5. 

t See Dr. Thurman " On the Two Principal Forms of Ancient 
British and Gaulish Skulls." 



BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 217 

Germany and of Scandinavia at tlie present day — the 
soutli-western Germans and the Swiss being markedly 
broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predomi- 
nantly long-headed. 

What the natives of Ireland were like at the time of 
the Roman conquest of Britain, and for centuries after- 
wards, we have no certain knowledge ; but the earliest 
trustworthy records prove the existence, side by side 
with one another, of a fair and a dark stock, in Ireland 
as in Britain. The long form of skull is jDi'edominant 
among the ancient, as among modern, Irish. 

II. The people termed Gauls, and those called Ger- 
manSj by the Romans, did not differ in any important 
physical character. 

The terms in which the ancient writers describe both 
Gauls and Germans are identical. They are always tall 
people, with massive limbs, fair skins, fierce blue eyes, 
and hair the colour of which ranges from red to yellow. 
Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms 
broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be 
found between the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, 
so far as their characters are recorded by the old his- 
torians ; and he proves his case by citations from a cloud 
of witnesses. 

An attempt has been made to show that the colour of 
the hair of the Gauls must have differed very much 
from that which obtained among the Germans, on the 
strength of the story told by Suetonius {Caligula, 4), 
that Caligula tried to pass off Gauls for Germans by 
picking out the tallest, and making them ^^ rutilare et 
summittere comam." 

The Baron de Bellogu^t remarks upon this passage ; 

" It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that Cali- 
gula got up this military comedy. And the fact proves that 



218 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

the Belgas were already sensibly different from their ancestors, 
whom Strabo had found almost identical with their brothers 
on the other side of the Rhine." 

But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, 
proves nothing; for the Germans themselves were in 
the habit of reddening their hair. Ammianus Marcel- 
linus"^ tells how, in the year 367 a. d., the Roman com- 
mander, Jovinus, surprised a body of Alemanni near 
the town now called Charpeigne, in the valley of the 
Moselle; and how the Roman soldiers, as, concealed by 
the thick wood, they stole upon their unsuspecting en- 
emies, saw that some were bathing and others '' comas 
rutilantes ex more.'' More than two centuries earlier 
Pliny gives indirect evidence to the same effect when he 
says of soap: — 

" Galliarum hoc inventum rutilandis capillis . . . apud Ger- 
manos majore in usu viris quam foeminis." t 

Here we have a writer who flourished not very long 
after the date of the Caligula story, telling us that the 
Gauls invented soap for the purpose of doing that 
which, according to Suetonius, Caligula forced them to 
do. And, further, the combined and independent testi- 
mony of Pliny and Ammianus assures us that the Ger- 
mans were as much in the habit of reddening their hair 
as the Gauls. As to De Belloguet's supposition that, 
even in Caligula's time, the Gauls had become darker 
than their ancestors were, it is directly contradicted by 
Ammianus Marcellinus, who knew the Gauls well. 
" Celsioris staturse et candidi poene Galli sunt ornne^ 
et rutili, luminumque torvitate terrililes," is his descrip- 
tion ; and it would fit the Gauls who sacked Rome. 

III. In none of the invasions of Britain ivhich have 

* Bes Gestae, xxvii. t Historia Naturalis, xxviii, 51. 



BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 219 

taken place since the Roman dominion, has any other 
type of man been introduced than one or other of the 
two which existed during that dominion. 

The Korth Germans, who effected what is commonly 
called the Saxon conquest of Britain, were, most assur- 
edly, a fair, yellow, or red-haired, blue-eyed, long-skulled 
people. So were the Danes and the Norsemen who fol- 
lowed them; though it is very possible that the active 
slave trade which went on, and the intercourse with 
Ireland, may have introduced a certain admixture of 
the dark stock into both Denmark and ^NTorway. The 
IN'orman conquest brought in new ethnological elements, 
the precise value of which cannot be estimated with 
exactness ; but as to their quality, there can be no ques- 
tion, inasmuch as even the wide area from which Wil- 
liam drew his followers could yield him nothing but the 
fair and the dark types of men, already present in Brit- 
ain. But whether the Xorman settlers, on the whole, 
strengthened the fair or the dark element, is a problem, 
the elements of the solution of which are not attainable. 

I am unable to discover any grounds for believing 
that a Lapp element has ever entered into the popula- 
tion of these islands. So far as the physical evidence 
goes, it is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that 
the only constituent stocks of that population, now, or 
at any other period about which we have evidence, aro 
the dark whites, whom I have proposed to call ^'Melano- 
chroi/' and the fair whites, or ''Xanthochroi/' 

IV. The Xanthochroi and the Melanochroi of Brit- 
ain are, speaking broadly, distrihuted, at present, as 
they IV ere in tJie time of Tacitus; and their representa- 
tives 071 the continent cf Europe have the same general 
distrihution as at the earliest period of which we have 
any record. 



220 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

At the present day, and notwithstanding the exten- 
sive intermixture effected by the movements consequent 
on civilisation and on political changes, there is a pre- 
dominance of dark men in the west, and of fair men in 
the east and north, of Britain. At the present day, as 
from the earliest times, the predominant constituents of 
the riverain population of the ]^orth Sea and the east- 
ern half of the British Channel, are fair mem The fair 
stock continues in force through Central Europe, until 
it is lost in Central Asia. Offshoots of this stock extend 
into Spain, Italy, and I^orthern India, and by Avay of 
Syria and jSTorth Africa, to the Canary Islands. They 
were known in very early times to the Chinese, and in 
still earlier to the ancient Egyptians, as frontier tribes. 
The Thracians were notorious for their hair and blue 
eyes many centuries before our era. 

On the other hand the dark stock predominates in 
Southern and Western France, in Spain, along the 
Ligurian shore, and in Western and Southern Italy; in 
Greece, Asia, Syria, and x^Torth Africa ; in Arabia-, 
Persia, Afghanistan, and Hindostan, shading gradual- 
ly, through all stages of darkening, into the type of tlie 
modern Egyptian, or of the wild Hill-man of the Dek- 
kan. Xor is there any record of the existence of a dif- 
ferent population in all these countries. 

The extreme north of Europe, and the northern part 
of Western Asia, are at present occupied by a Mongo- 
loid stock, and, in the absence of evidence to the con- 
trary, may be assumed to have been so peopled from a 
very remote epoch. But, as I have said, I can find i^o 
evidence that this stock ever took part in peopling Brit- 
ain. Of the three great stocks of mankind which extend 
from the western coast of the great Eurasiatic continent 
to its southern and eastern shores, the Mongoloids oc- 



JBRITISH ETHNOLOGY. ^2| 

eupy a vast triangle, the base of which is the whole of 
Eastern Asia, while its apex lies in Lapland. The 
Melanochroi, on the other hand, may be represented as 
a broad band stretching from Ireland to Hindostan; 
while the Xanthochroic area lies between the two, thins 
out, so to sj)eak, at either end, and mingles, at its mar- 
gins, with both its neighbours. 

Such is a brief and summary statement of what T 
believe to be the chief facts relating to the physical 
ethnology of the people of Britain. The conclusions 
which I draw from these and other facts are — (1) That 
the Melanochroi and the Xanthochroi are two separate 
races in the biological sense of the word race; (2) That 
they have had the same general distribution as at pres- 
ent from the earliest times of which any record exists on 
the continent of Europe; (3) That the population of 
the British Islands is derived from them, and from 
them only. 

The people of Europe, however, owe their national 
names, not to their physical characteristics, but to their 
languages, or to their political relations ; which, it is 
plain, need not have the slightest relation to these char- 
acteristics. 

Thus, it is quite certain that, in Caesar's time, Gaul 
was divided politically into three nationalities — the 
Be'gse, the Celtcie, and the Aquitani; and that the last 
were very widely different, both in language and in 
physical characteristics, from the two former. The 
Belgse, the Celta?, and the Aquitani ; and that the last 
paratively little either in physique or in language. On 
the former point there is the distinct testimony of 
Strabo ; as to the latter, St. Jerome states that the 
^^ Galatians had almost the same language as the Tre- 
viri." Xow, the Galatians were emigrant Yolcffi Tec- 



^22 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

tosages, and therefore Celte; while the Treviri were 
Belgse.^ 

At the present day, the physical characters of the 
people of Belgic Gaul remain distinct from those of the 
people of Aquitaine, notwithstanding the immense 
changes which have taken place since Caesar's time ; but 
Belgse, Celtse, and Aquitani (all but a mere fraction of 
the last two, represented by the Basques and the Bret- 
ons) are fused into one nationality, '' le peuple Fran- 
gais." But they have adopted the language of one set of 
invaders, and the name of another ; their original names 
and languages having almost disappeared. Suppose 
that the French language remained as the sole evidence 
of the existence of the population of Gaul, would the 
keenest philologer arrive at any other conclusion than 
that this population was essentially and fundamentally 
a " Latin '' race, which had had some communication 
with Celts and Teutons ? Would he so much as suspect 
the former existence of the Aquitani ? 

Community of language testifies to close contact be- 
tween the people who speak the langiaage, but to nothing 
else; philology has absolutely nothing to do with eth- 
nology, except so far as it suggests the existence or the 
absence of such contact. The contrary assumption, 
that language is a test of race, has introduced the ut- 
most confusion into ethnological speculation, and has 
nowhere worked greater scientific and practical mis- 
chief than in the ethnology of the British Islands. 

What is known, for certain, about the languages 
spoken in these islands and their affinities may, I 
believe, be summed up as follows : — 

I. At the time of the Roman conquest, one language, 
the Celtic, under two iirincipal dialectical divisions, 

[* This proposition is disputed. — 1894.] 



BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 223 

the Cymric and the Gaelic, was spoken throughout the 
British Islands. Cymric was spoken in Britain, Gaelic^' 
in Ireland. 

If a language allied to Basque had in earlier times 
been spoken in the British Islands, there is no evidence 
that any Euskarian-speaking people remained at the 
time of the Roman conquest. The dark and the fair 
population of Britain alike spoke Celtic tongues, and 
therefore the name '' Celt " is as applicable to the one 
as to the other. 

What was spoken in Ireland can only be surmised by 
reasoning from the knowledge of later times ; but there 
seems to be no doubt that it was Gaelic. 

II. The Belgce and the Celtce, ivith the offshoots of 
the latter in Asia Minor, spoke dialects of the Cymric 
division of Celtic. 

The evidence of this proposition lies in the state- 
ment of St. Jerome before cited ; in the similarity of 
the names in Belgic Gaul and in Britain ; and in 
the direct comparison of sundry ancient Gaulish and 
Belgic words which have been preserved, with the 
existing Cymric dialects, for which I must refer to the 
learned work of Brandes. 

Formerly, as at the present day, the Cymric dialects 
of Celtic were spoken by both the fair and the dark 
stocks. 

III. There is no record of Gaelic being spoken any- 
ivhere save in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. 

This ajDpears to be the final result of the long dis- 
cussions which have taken place on this much debated 

[* I have been told that the terms " Cymric " and " Gaelic " 
are antiquated and improper. The reader will please substi- 
tute Celtic dialect A and Celtic dialect B for them, and con- 
sult, on this subject, especially with regard to proposition III., 
Professor Rhys' Early Britain-. — 1894.] 



224 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

question. As is the case with the Cjniric dialects, 
Gaelic is now spoken by both dark and fair stocks. 

IV. When the Teutonic languages first became 
laioiun, they ivere spoken only^ by Xanthochroci, that is 
to say, by the Germans, the Scandinavians, and Goths. 
And they luere imjjorted by Xanthochroi into Gaul and 
into Britain. 

In Gaul, the imported Teutonic dialect has been 
completely overpow^ered by the more or less modified 
Latin, which it found already in possession ; and what 
Teutonic blood there may be in modern Frenchmen is 
not adequately represented in their langaiage. In 
Britain, on the contrary, the Teutonic dialects have 
overpowered the pre-existing forms of speech, and the 
people are vastly less " Teutonic " than their language. 
Whatever may have been the extent to which the Celtic- 
speaking population of the eastern half of Britain was 
trodden out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking 
Saxons and Danes, it is quite certain that no considera- 
ble displacement of the Celtic-speaking people occurred 
in Cornwall, Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland ; and 
that nothing approaching to the extinction of that people 
took place in Devonshire, Somerset, or the western moi- 
ety of Britain generally. ^Nevertheless, the funda- 
mentally Teutonic English language is now spoken 
throughout Britain, except by an insignificant fraction 
of the population in Wales and the Western Highlands. 
But it is obvious that this fact affords not the slightest 
justification for the common practice of speaking of the 
present inhabitants of Britain as an ^' Anglo-Saxon " 
race. It is, in fact, just as absurd as the habit of talking 
of the French people as a ^^ Latin " race, because they 

[* " Only " is too strong a word, as there were doubtless 
come Melanochroi among the Teutonic tribes. — 1894.] 



fiRlTISH ETHNOLOGY. 225 

speak a language which is, in the main, derived from 
Latin. And the absurdity becomes the more patent when 
those who have no hesitation in calling a Devonshire 
man, or a Cornish man, an " Anglo-Saxon," would 
think it ridiculous to call a Tipperary man by the same 
title, though he and his forefathers may have spoken 
English for as long a time as the Cornish man. 

Ireland, at the earliest period of which we have any 
knowledge, contained, like Britain, a dark and a fair 
stock, which there is every reason to believe, were iden- 
tical with the dark and the fair stocks of Britain. 
When the Irish first became known they spoke a Gaelic 
dialect, and though, for many centuries, Scandinavians 
made continual incursions upon, and settlements among 
them, the Teutonic languages made no more way among 
the Irish than they did among the French. How much 
Scandinavian blood was introduced there is no evidence 
II. the English people, consisting in part of the descen- 
to show. But after the conquest of Ireland by Henry 
dants of Cymric speakers, and in part of the descendants 
of Teutonic speakers, made good their footing in the 
eastern half of the island, as the Saxons and Danes 
made good theirs in England ; and did their best to com- 
plete the parallel by attempting the extirpation of the 
Gaelic-speaking Irish. And they succeeded to a con- 
siderable extent ; a large part of Eastern Ireland is now 
peopled by men who are substantially English by de- 
scent, and the English language has spread over the 
land far beyond the limits of English blood. 

Ethnologically, the Irish people were originally, like 
the people of Britain, a mixture of Melanochroi and 
Xanthochroi. They resembled the Britons in speaking 
a Celtic tongue; but it was a Gaelic and not a Cymric 
form of the Celtic language. Ireland was untouched 

15 



^^0 maK's place in nature. 

by the Roman conquest, nor do the Saxons seem to hav6 
had any influence upon her destinies, but the Danes and 
Norsemen poured in a contingent of Teutonism, which 
has been largely supplemented by English and Scotch 
efforts. 

What, then, is the value of the ethnologi ^al difference 
between the Englishman of the western half of England 
and the Irishman of tho eastern half of Ireland ? For 
what reason does the one deserve the name of a '^ Celt,'^ 
and not the other ? And further, if we turn to the 
inhabitants of the western half of Ireland, why should 
the term '' Celts " be applied to them more than to the 
inhabitants of Cornwall ? And if the name is applicable 
to the one as justly as to the other, why should not 
intelligence, perseverance, thrift, industry, sobriety, 
respect for law, be admitted to be Celtic virtues ? And 
why should we not seek for the cause of their absence 
in something else than the idle pretext of ^^ Celtic 
blood " ? 

I have been unable to meet with any answers to these 
questions. 

V. The Celtic and the Teutonic dialects are members 
of the same great Aryan family of languages; hut there 
is evidence to shoiv that a non- Aryan language was at 
one time spoJcen over a large exterit of the area occupied 
hy Melanochroi in Europe. 

The non-Aryan language here referred to is the 
Euskarian, now spoken only by the Basques, but which 
seems in earlier times to have been the language of the 
Aquitanians and Spaniards, and may possibly have ex- 
tended much further to the East. Whether it has any 
connection with the Ligurian and Oscan dialects are 
questions upon which, of course, I do not presume to 
offer any opinion. But it is important to remark that 



BRif ISH ETHNOLOGY. 22? 

it is a language the area of which has gradually dim- 
inished without any corresponding extirpation of the 
people who primitively spoke it; so that the people of 
Spain and of Aquitaine at the present day must be 
largely " Euskarian " by descent in just the same sense 
as the Cornish men are '' Celtic " by descent. 

Such seem to me to be the main facts respecting the 
ethnology of the British islands and of Western Europe, 
which may be said to be fairly established. The hy- 
pothesis by which I think (with De Belloguet and 
Thurnam) the facts may best be explained is this: In 
very remote times Western Europe and the British 
islands were inhabited by the dark stock, or the Melan- 
ochroi, alone, and these Melanochroi spoke dialects 
allied to the Euskarian. The Xanthochroi, spreading 
over the great Eurasiatic plains westward, and speak- 
ing Aryan dialects, gradually invaded the territories of 
the Melanochroi. The Xanthochroi, who thus came 
into contact with the Western Melanochroi, spoke a 
Celtic language; and that Celtic language whether 
Cymric or Gaelic, spread over the Melanochroi far be- 
yond the limits of intermixture of blood, supplanting 
Euskarian, just as English and French have supplanted 
Celtic. Even as early as Csesar's time, I suppose that 
the Euskarian was everywhere, except in Spain and in 
Aquitaine, replaced by Celtic, and thus the Celtic 
speakers were no longer of one ethnological stock, but 
of two. Both in Western Europe and in England a 
third wave of language — in the one case Latin, in the 
other Teutonic — has spread over the same area. In 
Western Europe, it has left a fragment of the primary 
Euskarian in one corner of the country, and a frag- 
ment of the secondary Celtic in another. In the 
British islands, only outlying pools of the secondary 



228 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

linguistic wave remain in Wales, the Highlands, Ire* 
land, and the Isle of Man. If this hypothesis is a sound 
one, it follows that the name of Celtic is not properly 
applicable to the Melanochroic or dark stock of Europe. 
They are merely, so to speak, secondary Celts. The 
primary and aboriginal Celtic-speaking people are 
Xanthochroi — the typical Gauls of the ancient w^riters, 
and the close allies by blood, customs, and language, of 
the Germans. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 229 



VI. 

THE ARYAN QUESTION AND PREHISTORIC 

MAN. 

[1890.] 

The rapid increase of natural knowledge, which is 
the chief characteristic of our age, is effected in various 
ways. The main army of science moves to the conquest 
of new worlds slowly and surely, nor ever cedes an inch 
of the territory gained. But the advance is covered 
and facilitated by the ceaseless activity of clouds of 
light troops provided with a weapon — ahvays efficient, 
if not always an arm of precision — the scientific 
imagination. It is the business of these enfants perdus 
of science to make raids into the realm of ignorance 
wherever they see, or think they see, a chance; and 
cheerfully to accept defeat, or it may be annihilation, 
as the reward of error. Unfortunately, the public, 
which watches the progress of the campaign, too often 
mistakes a dashing incursion of the Uhlans for a for- 
ward movement of the main body ; fondly imagining 
that the strategic movement to the rear, which occasion- 
ally follows, indicates a battle lost by science. And it 
must be confessed that the error is too often justified by 
the effects of the irrepressible tendency which men of 
science share with all other sorts of men known to mo, 
to be impatient of that most wholesome state of mind 



230 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

— suspended judgment ; to assume the objective truth of 
speculation which, from the nature of the evidence in 
their favour, can have no claim to be more than work- 
ing hypotheses. 

The history of the ^' Aryan question '' affords a strik- 
ing illustration of these general remarks. 

About a century ago, Sir William Jones pointed out 
the close alliance of the chief European languages with 
Sanskrit and its derivative dialects now spoken in 
India. Brilliant and laborious philologists, in long suc- 
cession, enlarged and strengthened this position, until 
the truth that Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, 
Lithuanian, Slavonian, German, Celtic, and so on, 
stand to one another in the relation of descendants from 
a common stock, became firmly established, and thence- 
forward formed part of the permanent acquisitions of 
science. Moreover, the term " Aryan " is very general- 
ly, if not universally, accepted as a name for the group 
of languages thus allied. Hence, when one speaks of 
^^ Aryan languages," no hypothetical assumptions are 
involved. It is a matter of fact that such languages 
exist, that they present certain substantial and formal 
relations, and that convention sanctions the name ap- 
plied to them. But the close connection of these widely 
differentiated languages remains altogether inexplica- 
ble, unless it is admitted that they are modifications of 
an original relatively undifferentiated tongue; just as 
the intimate affinities of the Bomance languages — 
French, Italian, Spanish, and the rest — would be in- 
comprehensible if there were no Latin. The original 
or " primitive Aryan " tongue, thus postulated, unfor- 
tunately no longer exists. It is a hypothetical entity, 
wdiich corresponds with the "' primitive stock " of gen- 
eric and higher groups among plants and animals; and 



BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 231 

the acknowledgment of its former existence, and of the 
process of evolution which has brought about the present 
state of things philological, is forced upon us by deduc- 
tive reasoning of similar cogency to that employed about 
things biological. 

Thus, the former existence of a body of relatively 
uniform dialects, which may be called primitive Aryan, 
may be added to the stock of definitely acquired truths. 
But it is obvious that, in the absence of writing or of 
phonographs, the existence of a language implies that of 
speakers. If there were primitive Aryan dialects, there 
must have been primitive Aryan people who used them ; 
and these people must have resided somewhere or other 
on the earth's surface. Hence philology, without step- 
ping beyond its legitimate bounds and keeping specula- 
tion within the limits of bare necessity, arrives, not 
only at the conceptions of Aryan languages and of a 
primitive Aryan language; but of a primitive Aryan 
people and of a primitive Aryan home, or country 
occupied by them. 

But where was this home of the Aryans ? When the 
labours of modern philologists began, Sanskrit was the 
most archaic of all the Aryan languages known to them. 
It appeared to present the qualifications required in the 
parental or primitive Aryan. Brilliant Uhlans made a 
charge at this 023ening. The scientific imagination seated 
the primitive Aryans in the valley of the Ganges; and 
showed, as in a vision, the successive columns, guided by 
enterprising Brahmins, which set out thence to people 
the regions of the western world with Greeks and Celts 
and Germans. But the progress of philology itself suf- 
ficed to show that this Balaclava charge, however mag- 
nificent, was not profitable warfare. The internal evi- 
dence of the Yedas proved that their composers had not 
reached the Ganges. On the other hand, the comparison 



232 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

of Zend with Sanskrit left no alternative open to tlie? 
assumption that these languages Avere modifications of 
an original Indo-Iranian tongue, spoken by a people of 
whom the Aryans of India and those of Persia were 
offshoots, and who could therefore be hardly lodged else- 
where than on the frontiers of both Persia and India — 
that is to say, somewhere in the region which is at pres- 
ent known under the names of Turkestan, Afghanistan, 
and Kafiristan. Thus far, it can hardly be doubted 
that we are well within the ground of which science has 
taken enduring possession. But the Uhlans were not 
content to remain within the lines of this surely-won 
position. For some reason, which is not quite clear to 
me, they thought fit to restrict the home of the primitive 
Aryans to a particular part of the region in question ; 
to lodffe them amidst the bleak hei2;hts of the Ions: ran2;e 
of the Hindoo Koosh and on the inhospitable plateau 
of Pamir. From their hives in these secluded valleys 
and wind-swept wastes, successive swarms of Celts and 
Greco-Latins, Teutons and Slavs, were thrown off to 
settle, after long wanderings, in distant Europe. The 
Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir theory, once enunciated, gradually 
hardened into a sort of dogma ; and there have not been 
wanting theorists, who laid down the routes of the suc- 
cessive bands of emigrants with as much confidence as if 
they had access to the records of the office of a primitive 
Aryan Quartermaster-General. It is really singular to 
observe the deference which has been shown, and is yet 
sometimes shown, to a speculation which can, at best, 
claim to be regarded as nothing better than a somewhat 
risky working hypothesis. 

Forty years ago, the credit of the Hindoo-Koosh- 
Pamir theory had risen almost to that of an axiom. The 
first person to instil doubt of its value into my mind was 



BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 233 

the late Robert Gordon Latliam, a man of great learning 
and singular originality, whose attacks upon the Hin- 
doo-Kooshite doctrine could scarcely have failed as com- 
pletely as they did, if his great powers had been 
bestowed upon making his books not only worthy of 
being read, but readable. The impression left upon my 
mind, at that time, by various conversations about the 
■' Sarmatian hypothesis," which my friend wished to 
substitute for the Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir speculation, 
was that the one and the other rested pretty much upon 
a like foundation of guess-work. That there was no 
sufficient reason for planting the primitive Aryans in 
the Hindoo Koosh, or in Pamir, seemed p'ain enough ; 
but that there was little better ground, on the evidence 
then adduced, for settling them in the region at present 
occupied by AVestern Russia, or Podolia, appeared to me 
to be not less plain. The most I thought Latham proved 
Avas, that the Aryan people of Indo-Iranian s^Dcech were 
just as likely to have come from Europe, as the Aryan 
people of Greek, or Teutonic, or Celtic speech from 
Asia. Of late years, Latham's views, so long neglected, 
or mentioned merely as an example of insular eccentri- 
city, have been taken up and advocated with much 
ability in Germany as well as in this country — princi- 
pally by philologists. Indeed, the glory of Hindoo- 
Koosh-Pamir seems altogether to have departed. Pro- 
fessor Max Mliller, to whom Aryan philology owes so 
much, will not say more now, than that he holds by the 
conviction that the seat of the primitive Aryans was 
^' somewhere in Asia." Dr. Schrader sums up in favour 
of European Russia ; while Herr Penka would have us 
transplant the home of the primitive Aryans from 
Pamir in the far east to the Scandinavian peninsula in 
the far Avest, 



234 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

I must refer those who desire to acquaint themselves 
with the philological arguments on which these con- 
clusions are based to the recently published works of Dr. 
Schrader and Canon Taylor ; " and to Penka's " Die 
Herkunft der Arier/' Avhich, in spite of the strong spice 
of the Uhlan which runs through it, I have found ex- 
tremely well worth study. I do not pretend to be able 
to look at the Aryan question under any but the biolog- 
ical aspect ; to which I now turn. 

Any biologist who studies the history of the Aryan 
question, and, taking the philological facts on trust, 
regards it exclusively from the point of view of anthro- 
pology, will observe that, very early, the purely biolog- 
ical conception of " race " illegitimately mixed itself up 
with the ideas derived from pure philology. It is quite 
proper to speak of Aryan " people," because, as we have 
seen, the existence of the language implies that of a 
people who speak it ; it might be equally permissible to 
call Latin people all those who speak Romance dialects. 
But, just as the application of the term Latin ^^ race " to 
the divers people who speak Romance languages, at the 
present day, is none the less absurd because it is com- 
mon ; so, it is quite possible, that it may be equally 
wrong to call the people who spoke the primitive Aryan 
dialects and inhabited the primitive home, the Aryan 
race. " Aryan " is properly a term of classification used 
in philology. " Race " is the name of a sub-division of 
one of those groups of living things which are called 
'" species " in the technical language of Zoology and 
Botany ; and the term connotes the possession of char- 



* Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples. 
Translated by P. B. Jevons, M.A., 1890. Taylor, The Origin of 
the Aryans^ 1890. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 235 

acters distinct from those of the other members of the 
species, which have a strong tendency to appear in the 
progeny of all members of the races. Such race-charac- 
ters may be either bodily or mental, though in practice, 
the latter, as less easy of observation and definition, can 
rarely be taken into account. Language is rooted half 
in the bodily and half in the mental nature of man. 
The vocal sounds which form the raw materials of 
language could not be produced without a peculiar con- 
formation of the organs of speech ; the enunciation of 
duly accented syllables would be impossible without the 
nicest co-ordination of the action of the muscles which 
move these organs ; and such co-ordination depends on 
the mechanism of certain portions of the nervous 
system. It is therefore conceivable that the structure 
of this highly complex speaking apparatus should deter- 
mine a man's linguistic potentiality ; that is to say, 
should enable him to use a language of one class and not 
of another. It is further conceivable that a particular 
linguistic potentiality should, be inherited and become as 
good a race mark as any other. As a matter of fact, it 
is not proven that the linguistic potentialities of all men 
are the same. It is affirmed, for example that, in the 
United States, the enunciation and the timbre of the 
voice of an American-born negro, however thoroughly 
he may have learned English, can be readily distin- 
guished from that of a white man. But, even admitting 
that differences may obtain among the various races of 
men, to this extent, I do not think that there is any good 
ground for the supposition that an infant of any race 
Avould be unable to learn, and to use with ease, the 
language of any other race of men among whom it might 
be brought up. History abundantly proves the trans- 
raission of languages from some races to others; and 



236 MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 

there is no evidence, that I know of, to show that any 
race is incapable of substituting a foreign idiom for its 
native tongue. 

From these considerations it follows that community 
of language is no proof of unity of race, is not even 
presumptive evidence of racial identity.''' All that it 
does prove is that, at some time or other, free and pro- 
longed intercourse has taken place between the speakers 
of the same lano'uage. Philolo2jv, therefore, while it 
may have a perfect right to postulate the existence of a 
primitive Aryan '' people," has no business to substitute 
'' race " for " people." The speakers of primitive 
x\ryan may have been a mixture of two or more races, 
just as are the speakers of English and of French, at 
the present time. 

The older philological ethnologists felt the difficulty 
which arose out of their identification of linguistic with 
racial affinity, but were not dismayed by it. Strong in 
the prestige of their great discovery of the unity of the 
Aryan tongues, they were quite prepared to make the 
philological and the biological categories fit, by the exer- 
cise of a little pressure on that about which they knew 
less. And their judgment was often unconsciously 
warped by strong monogenistic proclivities, which, at 

* Canon Taylor (Origin of the Aryans, p. 31) states that 
" Cimo .... was the first to insist on what is now looked on 
as an axiom in ethnology — that race is not co-extensive with 
language," in a work published in 1871. I may be permitted 
to quote a passage from a lecture delivered on the 9th of Jan- 
uary, 1870, which brought me into a great deal of trouble. 
•' Physical, mental, and moral peculiarities go with blood and 
not with language. In the United States the Negroes have 
spoken English for generations; but no one on that groui^d 
would call them Englishmen, or expect them to differ phys- 
ically, mriitall'% or morally from other negroes." — Pall Mall 
Gazette, Jan. 10, 1S70. But the "axiom in ethnology" had 
been implied, if not enunciated, before my time; for example, 
by Desmoullus in 1826 (See above p. 215.) 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 23? 

bottom, however respectable and pbilantbropic their 
origin, had nothing to do with science. So the patent 
fact that men of Aryan speech presented widely diverse 
racial characters was explained away by maintaining 
that the physical differentiation was post-Aryan ; to put 
it broadly, that the Aryans in Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir 
were truly of one race ; but that, while one colony, sub- 
jected to the sweltering heat of the Gangetic plains, had 
fined down and darkened into the Bengalee, another 
had bleached and shot up, under the cool and misty skies 
of the north, into the semblance of Pomeranian Grena- 
diers ; or of blue-eyed, fair-skinned, six-foot Scotch 
Ilighianders. I do not know that any of the Uhlans 
who fought so vigorously under this flag are left now. I 
doubt if any one is prepared to say that he believes that 
the influence of external conditions, alone, accounts for 
the wide physical differences between Englishmen and 
Bengalese. So far as India is concerned, the internal 
evidence of the old literature sufficiently proves that the 
Aryan invaders were "" white '' men. It is hardly to be 
doubted that they intermixed with the dark Dravidian 
aborigines ; and that the high-caste Hindoos are what 
they are in virtue of the Aryan blood which they have 
inherited," and of the selective influence of their sur- 
roundings operating on the mixture. 

* I am unable to discover good grounds for the severity of 
the criticism, in the name of " the anthropologists," with 
which Professor Max Miiller's assertion that the same blood 
runs in the veins of English soldiers " as in the veins of the 
dark Bengalese," and that there is " a legitimate relation- 
ship between Hindoo, Greek, and Teuton," has been visited. 
So far as I know anything about anthropology, I should say 
that these statements may be correct literally, and probably 
are so substantially. I do not know of any good reason for 
the physical differences between a high-caste Hindoo and a 
Dravidian, except the Aryan blood in the veins of the former; 
and the strength of the infusion is probably quite as great 
in some Hindoos as in some English soldiers. 



^38 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

The assumption that, as there must have been a prim- 
itive Aryan people, in the philological sense, so that 
people must have constituted a race in the biological 
sense, is pretty generally made in modern discussions of 
the Aryan problem. But whether the men of the prim- 
itive Aryan race were b-onds or brunets, whether they 
had long or round heads, were tall or were short, are 
hotly debated questions, into the discussion of which 
considerations quite foreign to science are sometimes 
imported. The combination of swarthiness with stature 
above the average and a long skull, confer upon me the 
serene impartiality of a mongrel ; and, having given this 
pledge of fair dealing, I proceed to state the case for 
the hjq^othesis I am inclined to adopt. In doing so, I 
am aware that I deliberately take the shilling of the 
recruiting-sergeant of the Light Brigade, and I warn all 
and sundry that such is the case. 

Looking at the discussions which have taken place 
from a purely anthropological point of view, the first 
point which has struck me is that the problem is far 
more complicated and difficult than many of the dis- 
putants appear to imagine ; and the second, that the data 
upon which we have to go are grievously insufficient in 
extent and in precision. Our historical records cover 
such an infinitesimal'y small extent of the past life of 
humanity, that we obtain little help from them. Even 
so late as 1500 b. c, northern Eurasia lies in historical 
darkness, except for such glimmer of light as may bo 
thrown here and there by the literatures of Egypt and 
of Babylonia. Yet, at that time, it is probable thut 
Sanskrit, Zend, and Greek, to say nothing of other 
Aryan-tongues, had long been differentiated from prim- 
itive Aryan. Even a thousand years later, little enough 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 239 

accurate information is to be had about the racial char- 
acters of the European and Asiatic tribes known to the 
Greeks. We are thrown upon such resources as archae- 
ology and human palseontology have to offer, and not- 
withstanding the remarkable progress made of late 
years, they are still meagre. Nevertheless, it strikes me 
that, from the purely anthropological side, there is a 
good deal to be said in favour of the two propositions 
maintained by the new school of philologists ; first, that 
the people who s]3oke '^ primitive Aryan " were a dis- 
tinct and well-marked race of mankind ; and, secondly, 
that the area of the distribution of this race, in primae- 
val times, lay in Europe, rather than in Asia. 

For the last two thousand years, at least, the southern 
half of Scandinavia and the opposite or southern shores 
of the Baltic have been occupied by a race of mankind 
possessed of very definite characters. Typical speci- 
mens have tall and massive frames, fair complexions, 
blue eyes, and yellow or reddish hair — that is to say, 
they are pronounced blonds. Their skulls are long, in 
the sense that the breadth is usually less, often much 
less, than four-fifths of the length, and they are usually 
tolerably high. But in this last respect they vary. Men 
of this blond, long-headed race abound from eastern 
Prussia to northern Belgium; they are met with in 
northern France and are common in some parts of our 
own islands. The people of Teutonic speech, Goths, 
Saxons, Alemanni, and Franks, who poured forth out of 
the regions bordering the North Sea and the Baltic, to 
the destruction of the Roman Empire, were men of this 
race; and the accounts of the ancient historians of the 
incursions of the Gauls into Italy and Greece, between 
the fifth and the second centuries b. c.^ leave little doubt 
that their hordes were largely, if not wholly, composed 



240 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

of similar men. The contents of numerous interments 
in southern Scandinavia prove that, as far back as arch- 
a^^ology takes us into the so-called neolithic age, the great 
majority of the inhabitants had the same stature and 
cranial peculiarities as at present, though their bony 
fabric bears marks of somewhat greater ruggedness and 
savagery. There is no evidence that the country was 
occupied by men before the advent of these tall, blond 
long-heads. But there is proof of the presence, along 
with the latter, of a small percentage of people with 
broad skulls; that is, the breadth of wdiich is more, often 
very much more, than four-fifths of the length. 

At the present day, in whatever direction we travel 
inland from the continental area occupied by the blond 
long-heads, whether south-w^est into central France ; 
south, through the Walloon provinces of Belgium into 
eastern France ; into Switzerland, South Germany, and 
the Tyrol ; or south-east, into Poland and Kussia ; or 
north, into Finland and Lapland, broad-heads make 
their appearance, in force, among the long-heads. And, 
eventually, we find ourselves among people who are as 
regularly broad-headed as the Swedes and ^orth Ger- 
mans are long-headed. As a general rule, in France, 
Belgium, Switzerland, and South Germany, the in- 
crease in the proportion of broad skulls is accompanied 
by the appearance of a larger and larger proportion of 
men of brunet complexion and of a lower stature ; until, 
in central France and thence eastwards, through the 
Cevennes and the Alps of Dauphiny, Savoy, and Pied- 
mont, to the western plains of North Italy, the tall 
blond long-heads^' practically disappear, and are re- 

* I may plead the precedent of the good English words 
" block-head " and " thick-head " for " broad-head " and " long- 
head," but I cannot say thai they are elegant. I might have 
employed the technical terms brachycephali and dolichoce- 
phali. But it cannot be said that they are much more grace- 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. ^41 

placed by sliort hrunet broad-heads. The ordinary Savoy- 
ard may be described in terms the converse of those 
which apply to the ordinary Swede. He is sliort, 
swarthy, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and his skull is very 
broad. Between the two extreme types, the one seated 
on the shores of the Xorth Sea and the Baltic, and the 
other on those of the Mediterranean, there are all sorts 
of intermediate forms, in which breadth of skull may 
be found in tall and in short blond men, and in tall 
brunet men. 

There is much reason to believe that the brunet broad- 
heads, now met with in central France and in the west 
central European highlands, have inhabited the same 
region, not only throughout the historical period, but 
long before it commenced ; and it is probable that their 
area of occupation was formerly more extensive. For, if 
we leave aside the comparatively late incursions of the 
Asiatic races, the centre of eruption of the invaders of 
the southern moiety of Europe has been situated in the 
north and west. In the case of the Teutonic inroads 
upon the Empire of Rome, it undoubtedly lay in the 
area now occupied by the blond long-heads ; and, in that 
of tlie antecedent Gaulish invasions, the physical char- 
acters ascribed to the leading tribes point to the same 
conclusion. Whatever the causes which led to the break- 
ing out of bounds of the blond long-heads, in mass, at 
particular epochs, the natural increase in numbers of a 

ful; and, moreover, they are sometimes employed in senses 
different from that which I have given in the definition of 
broad-heads and long-heads. The cephalic index is a number 
which expresses the relation of the breadth to the length of a 
skull, taking the latter as 100. Therefore " broad-heads " have 
the cephalic index above 80 and " long-heads " have it below 
80. The physiological value of the difference is unknown; its 
morphological value depends upon the observed fact of the 
constancy of the occurrence of either long skulls or broad 
skulls among large bodies of mankind, 

i6 



142 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

vigorous and fertile race must always have impelled 
them to press upon their neighbours, and thereby afford 
abundant occasions for intermixture. If, at any given 
pre-historic time, we suppose the lowlands verging on 
the Baltic and the E^orth Sea to have been inhabited by 
pure blond long-heads, while the central highlands were 
occupied by pure brunet short-heads, the two would cer- 
tainly meet and intermix in course of time, in spite of 
the vast belt of dense forest which extended, almost 
uninterruptedly, from the Carpathians to the Ardennes ; 
and the resuljt would be such an irregular gradation 
of the one type into the other as we do, in fact, meet 
with. 

On the south-east, east, and north-east, throughout 
what was once the kingdom of Poland, and in Finland, 
the preponderance of broad-heads goes along with a 
wide prevalence of blond complexion and of good 
stature. In the extreme north, on the other hand, 
marked broad-headedness is combined with low stature, 
swarthiness, and more or less strongly Mongolian feat- 
ures, in the Lapps. And it is to be observed that this 
type prevails increasingly to the eastward, among the 
central Asiatic populations. 

The population of the British Islands, at the present 
time, offers the two extremes of the tall blond and the 
short brunet types. The tall blond long-heads resemble 
those of the continent ; but our short brunet race is long- 
headed. Brunet broad-heads, such as those met with in 
the central European highlands, do not exist among us. 
This absence of any considerable number of distinctly 
broad-headed people (s'ay with the cephalic index above 
81 or 82) in the modern population of the United King- 
dom is the more remarkable, since the investigations of 
the late Dr. Thurnam, and others, proved the existence 



The Aryan question. 243 

of a large proportion of tall broad-heads among the 
people interred in British tumuli of the neolithic age. 
It would seem that these broad-skulled immigrants have 
been absorbed by an older long-skulled population; just 
as, in South Germany, the long-headed Alemanni have 
been absorbed by the older broad-heads. The short 
brunet long-heads are not peculiar to our islands. On 
the contrary, they abound in western France and in 
Spain, while they predominate in Sardinia, Corsica, 
and South Italy, and, it may be, occupied a much larger 
area in ancient times. 

Thus, in the region which has been under considera- 
tion, there are evidences of the existence of four races of 
men — (1) blond long-heads of tall stature, (2) brunet 
broad-heads of short stature, (3) mongoloid brunet 
broad-heads of short stature, (4) brunet long-heads of 
short stature. The regions in which these races appear 
with least admixture are — (1) Scandinavia, [N'ortli Ger- 
many, and parts of the British Islands; (2) central 
France, the central European highlands, and Pied- 
mont; (3) Arctic and eastern Europe, central Asia; 
(4) the western parts of the British Islands and of 
France ; Spain, South Italy. And the inhabitants of 
the localities which lie between these foci present the 
intermediate gradations, such as short blond longheads, 
and tall brunet short-heads, and long-heads which might- 
be expected to result from their intermixture. The evi- 
dence at present extant is consistent with the supposi- 
tion that the blond long-heads, the brunet broad-heads^ 
and the brunet long-heads have existed in Europe 
throughout historic times, and very far back into pre- 
historic times. There is no proof of any migration of 
Asiatics into Europe, west of the basin of the Dnieper, 
down to the time of Attila. On the contrary, the first 



^44 MAN^S PLACE IN NATUHE. 

great movements of the European population of whick 
there is anj conclusive evidence is that series of Gaul- 
ish invasions of the east and south, which ultimately 
extended from ^N'orth Italy as far as Galatia in Asia 
Minor. 

It is now time to consider the relations between the 
phenomena of racial distribution, as thus defined, and 
those of the distribution of languages. The blond long- 
heads of Europe speak, or have spoken, Lithuanian, 
Teutonic, or Celtic dialects, and they are not known to 
have ever used any but these Aryan languages. A 
large proportion of the brunet broad-heads once spoke 
the Ligurian gnd the Ilha3tic dialects, which are be- 
lieved to have been non-Aryan. But, when the Komans 
made acquaintance with Transalpine Gaul, the inhabit- 
ants of that country between the Garonne and the Seine 
(Ca'sar's CeUica) seem, at any rate for the most part, to 
have spoken Celtic dialects. The brunet long-heads of 
Spain and of France appear to have used a non-Aryan 
language, that Euskarian which still lives on the shores 
of the Bay of Biscay. In Britain there is no certain 
knowledge of their use of any but Celtic tongues. What 
they spoke in the Mediterranean islands and in South 
Italy does not appear. 

The blond broad-heads of Poland and West Russia 
form part of a people who, when they first made their 
appearance in history, occupied the marshy plains im- 
perfectly drained by the Vistula, on the west, the Dun a, 
on the north, and the Dnieper and Bug, on the south. 
They were known to their neighbours as Wends, and 
among themselves as Serbs and Slavs. The Slavonic 
languages spoken by these people are said to be most 
closely allied to that of the Lithuanians, who lay upon 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 245 

their northern border. The Slavs resemble the South 
Germans in the predominance of broad-heads among 
them, while stature and complexion vary from the, often 
tall, blonds who prevail in Poland and Great Kussia to 
the, often short, brunets common elsewhere. There is 
certainly nothing in the history of the Slav people to 
interfere with the supposition that, from very early 
times, they have been a mixed race. For their country 
lies between that of the tall, blond, long-heads on the 
north, that of the short brunet broad-heads of the Euro- 
pean type on the west, and that of the short brunet 
broad-heads of the Asiatic type on the east : and, 
throughout their history, they have either thrust them- 
selves among their neighbours, or have been overrun 
and trampled down by them. Gauls and Goths have 
traversed their country, on their way to the east and 
south : Finno-tataric people, on their way to the west, 
have not only done the like, but have held them in sub- 
jection for centuries. On the other hand, there have 
been times when their western frontier advanced be- 
yond the Elbe ; indeed, it is asserted that they have sent 
colonies to Holland and even as far as southern Eng- 
land. A large part of eastern Germany ; Bohemia, 
Moravia, Hungary; the lower valley of the Danube and 
the Balkan peninsula, have been largely or completely 
Slavonised; and the Slavonic rule and language, which 
once had trouble to hold their own in West Russia and 
Little Russia, have now extended their sway over all 
the Finno-tataric populations of Great Russia ; while 
they are advancing, among those of central Asia, up to 
the frontiers of India on the south and to the Pacific 
on the extreme east. Thus it is hardly possible that 
fewer than three races should have contributed to the 
formation of the Slavonic people; namely^ the blond 



24:6 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

long-heads, the European brunet broad-heads, and the 
Asiatic briinet broad-heads. And, in the absence of 
evidence to the contrary, it is certainly permissible to 
suppose that it is the first race which has furnished the 
blond complexion and the stature observable in so many, 
especially of the northern Slavs, and that the brunet 
complexion and the broad skulls must be attributed io 
the other two. But, if that supposition is permissible, 
then the Aryan form and substance of the Slavonic 
languages may a' so be fairly supposed to have proceeded 
from the blond long-heads. They could not have come 
from the Asiatic brunet broad-heads, wdio all speak non- 
Aryan languages; and the presumption is against their 
coming from the brunet broad-heads of the central 
European highlands, among whom an apparently non- 
Aryan language was largely spoken, even in historical 
times. 

In the same way, the tall blond tribes among the Fins 
may be accounted for as the product of admixture. The 
gTeat majority of the Einno-tataric people are brunet 
broad-heads of the Asiatic type. But that the Eins 
proper have long been in contact with Arj^ans is evi- 
denced by the many words borrowed from Aryan which 
their language contains. Hence there has been abun- 
dant opportunity for the mixture of races; and for the 
transference to some of the Eins of more or fewer of 
the physical characters of the Aryans and vice versa. 
On any hypothesis, the frontier between Aryan and 
Einno-tataric people must have extended across west- 
central Asia for a very long period ; and, at any point 
of this frontier, it has been possible that mixed races of 
blond Eins or of brunet Aryans should be formed. 

So much for the European people who now speak 
Celtic, or Teutonic, or Slavonian, or Lithuanian 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 24t 

tongues ; or who are known to have spoken them, before 
the supersession of so many of the early native dialects 
by the Romance modifications of the language of Rome. 
With respect to the original speakers of Greek and 
Latin, the unravelling of the tangled ethnology of the 
Balkan peninsula and the ordering of the chaos of that 
of Italy are enterprises upon which I do not propose to 
enter. In regard to the first, however, there are a few 
tolerably satisfactory data. The ancient Thracians were 
proverbially blue-eyed and fair-haired. Tall blonds 
were common among the ancient Greeks who were a 
long-headed peo23le ; and the Sphakiots of Crete, prob- 
ably the purest representatives of the old Hellenes in 
existence, are tall and blond. But considering that 
Greek colonisation was taking place on a great scale in 
the eighth century, b. c, and that, centuries earlier and 
later, the restless Hellene had been fighting, trading, 
plundering and kidnapping, on both sides of the ^gean, 
and perhaps as far as the shores of Syria and of Egypt, 
it is probable that, even at the dawn of history, the 
maritime Greeks were a very mixed race. On the other 
hand, the Dorians may well have preserved the original 
type; and their famous migration may be the earliest 
known example of those movements of the Aryan race 
which were, in later times, to change the face of Europe. 
Analogy perhaps justifies a guess, that those ethnolog- 
ical shadows, the Pelasgi, may have been an earlier 
mixed population, like that of Western Gaul and of 
Britain before the Teutonic invasion. At any rate, the 
tall blond long-heads are so well represented in the 
oldest history of the Balkan peninsula, that they may 
be credited with the Aryan languages spoken there. 
And it may be that the tradition which peopled Phrygia 
with Thracians represents a real movement of the Ar- 



^48 HAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

van race into Asia Minor, such as that which in aftet 
years carried the Gauls thither. 

The difficukies in the way of a probable identification 
of the people among whom the various dialects of the 
Latin group developed themselves, with any race trace- 
able in Italy in historical times, are very great. In 
addition to the Italic "aborigines '^ northern Italy was 
peopled by Ligurian brunet broad-heads ; with Gauls, 
j^robably, to a large extent, blond long-heads; with 
Illyrians, about whom nothing is known. Besides these, 
there were those perplexing people the Etruscans, who 
seem to have been, originally, brunet long-heads. South 
Italy and Sicily present a contingent of ^' Sikels," 
Phoenicians and Greeks; while over all, in comparatively 
modern times, follows a wash of Teutonic blood. The 
Latin dialects arose, no one knows how, among the tribes 
of Central Italy, encompassed on all sides by people of 
the most various physical characters, who were gradu- 
ally absorbed into the eternally widening maw of Rome, 
and there, by dint of using the same speech, became the 
potch miscalled the Latin race. The only trustworthy 
first example of that wonderful ethnological hotch- 
guide here is archaeological investigation, A great ad- 
vance will have been made when the race characters of 
the pre-historic people of the terramare (who are iden- 
tified by Helbig " with the primitive Umbrians) become 
fully known. 

I cannot learn that the ancient literatures of India 
and of Persia give any definite information about the 
complexion of the Indo-Iranians, beyond conveying the 
impression that they were what we vaguely call whitd 

* Die Italiker in der Poehene, 1879. See for much valua- 
ble information respecting the races of the Balkan and Italic 
peninsulas, Zampa's essay " Vergleichende Anthropologische 
Ethnographie von Apulien." Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologies xviil., 
1886. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 249 

men. But it is important to note that tall blond people 
make their appearance sporadically among the Tadjiks 
of Persia and of Turkestan ;that the Siah-posh and Galt- 
chas of the mountainous barrier between Turkestan and 
India are such; and that the same characters obtain 
largely among the Kurds on the western frontier of 
Persia, at the present day. The Kurds and the Galtchas 
are generally broad-headed, the others are long-headed. 
These people and the ancient Alans thus form a series 
of stepping-stones between the blond Aryans of Europe 
and those of Asia, standing up amidst the flood of 
Finno-tataric people which has inundated the rest of the 
interval between the sources of the Dnieper and those of 
the Oxus. If only more Avas known about the Sarma- 
tians and the Scythians of the oldest historians, it is not 
improbable, I think, that we should discover that, even 
in historical times, the area occupied by the blond long- 
heads of Aryan speech has been, at least temporarily, 
continuous from the shores of the North Sea to central 
Asia. 

Suppose it to be admitted, as a fair working hypo- 
thesis, that the blond long-heads once extended without 
a break over this vast area, and that all the Aryan 
tongues have been developed out of their original 
speech, the question respecting the home of the race 
when the various families of Aryan speech were in the 
condition of inceptive dialects remains open. For all 
that, at first, appears to the contrary, it may have been 
in the west, or in the east, or anywhere between the two. 
In seeking for a solution of this obscure problem, it is 
an important preliminary to grasp the truth that the 
Aryan race must be much older than the primitive 
Aryan speech. It is not to be serioiisly imagined that 



250 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

the latter sprang suddenly into existence, by the act of 
a jealous Deity, apparently unaware of tha strength of 
man's native tendency towards confusion of speech. 
But if all the diverse languages of men were not brought 
suddenly into existence, in order to frustrate the plans 
of the audacious bricklaj-ers of the plain of Shinar; if 
this professedly historical statement is only another 
'^ type," and primitive Aryan, like all other languages, 
was built up by a secular process of development, the 
blond long-heads, among whom it grew into shape, must 
for ages have been, pliilologically speaking, non- Aryans, 
or perhaps one should say ^^ pro-Aryans." I suppose it 
may be safely assumed that Sanskrit and Zend and 
Greek were fully differentiated in the year 1500 b. c. 
If so, how much further back must the existence of the 
primitive Aryan, from which these proceeded, be dated ? 
And how much further yet, that real juventus mundi 
(so far as man is concerned) when primitive Aryan 
was in course of formation ? And how" much further 
still, the differentiation of the nascent Aryan blond 
long-head race from the primitive stock of mankind ? 

If any one maintains that the blond long-headed peo- 
ple, among whom, by the hypothesis, the primitive 
Aryan language was generated may have formed a sep- 
.arate race as far back as the pleistocene epoch, when the 
first unquestionable records of man make their appear- 
ance, I do not see that he goes beyond possibility — 
though, of course, that is a very different thing from 
proving his case. But, if the blond long-heads are thus 
ancient, the problem of their primitive seat puts on an 
altogether new aspect. Speculation must take into ac- 
count climatal and geographical conditions widely dif- 
ferent from those which obtain in northern Eurasia at 
the present day. During much of the vast length of thQ 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 251 

pleistocene period, it would seem that men could no 
more have lived either in Britain north of the Thames, 
or in Scandinavia, or in northern Germany, or in north- 
ern Russia, than they can live now in the interior of 
Greenland, seeing that the land was covered by a great 
ice sheet like that which at present shrouds the latter 
country. At that epoch, the blond long-heads cannot 
reasonably be supposed to have occupied the regions in 
which w^e meet with them in the oldest times of which 
history has kept a record. 

But even if we are content to assume a vastly less 
antiquity for the Aryan race ; if we only make the as- 
sumjDtion, for which there is considerable positive war- 
ranty, that it has existed in Europe ever since the end 
of the pleistocene period — when the fauna and flora 
assumed approximately their present condition and the 
state of things called Recent by geologists set in — we 
have to reckon with a distribution of land and water, 
not only very different from that which at present ob- 
tains in northern Eurasia, but of such a nature that it 
can hardly fail to have exerted a great influence on the 
development and the distribution of the races of man- 
kind. (See page 211, notef.) 

At the present time, four great separate bodies of 
water, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and 
Lake Balkash, occupy the southern end of the va-st 
plains which extend from the Arctic Sea to the high- 
lands of the Balkan peninsula, of Asia Minor, of Persia, 
of Afghanistan, and of the high plateaus of central Asia 
as far as the Altai. They lie for the most part between 
the parallels of 40° and 50° I^. and are separated by 
wide stretches of barren and salt-laden wastes. The 
surface of Balkash is 514 feet, that of the Aral 158 feet 
l^bovQ the Mediterranean, that of. the Caspian eighty- 



252 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

five feet below it. The Black Sea is in free communica- 
tion with the Mediterranean by the Bosphorns and the 
Dardanelles ; but the others, in historical times, have 
been, at most, temporarily connected with it and with 
one another, by relatively insignificant channels. This 
state of things, however, is comparatively modern. At 
no very distant period, the land of Asia Minor was con- 
tinuous with that of Europe, across the present site of 
the Bosphorus, forming a barrier several hundred feet 
high, which dammed up the waters of the Black Sea. 
A vast extent of eastern Europe and of western central 
Asia thus became a huge reservoir, the lowest part of 
the lip of which was probably situated somewhat more 
than 200 feet above the sea level, along the present 
southern watershed of the Obi, which flows into the 
Arctic Ocean. Into this basin, the largest rivers of 
Europe, such as the Danube and the Volga, and what 
were then great rivers of Asia, the Oxus and Jaxartes, 
with all the intermediate affluents, poured their waters. 
In addition, it received the overflow of Lake Balkash, 
then much larger ; and, probably, that of the inland sea 
of Mongolia. At that time, the level of the Sea of Aral 
stood at least GO feet higher than it does at present"^* 
Instead of the separate Black, Caspian, and Aral seas, 
there was one vast Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean, which 
must have been prolonged into arms and fiords along the 
lower valleys of the Danube, the Volga (in the course 
of which Caspian shells are now found as far as the 
Kuma), the Ural, and the other affluent rivers — while 
it seems to have sent its overflow, northward, through 
the present basin of the Obi. At the same time, there is 

* This is proved by the old shore-marks on the hill of 
Kashkanatao in the midst of the delta of the Oxus. Some au- 
thorities put the ancient level very much higher— 200 feet ov 
more (Keane, Asia^ p. 408}, 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 253 

reason to believe that the northern coast of Asia, whicli 
everywhere shows signs of recent slow upheaval, was 
situated far to the south of its present position. The 
consequences of this state of things have an extremely 
important bearing on the question under discussion. In 
the first place, an insular climate must be substituted 
for the present extremely continental climate of west 
central Eurasia. That is an important fact in many 
ways. For example, the present eastern climatal limi- 
tations of the beech could not have existed, and if primi- 
tive Aryan goes back thus far, the argaiments based 
upon the occurrence of its name in some Aryan lan- 
guages and not in others lose their force. In the second 
p^ace, the European and the Asiatic moieties of the 
great Eurasiatic plains were cut off from one another 
by the Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean and its prolonga- 
tions. In the third place, direct access to Asia Minor, 
to the Caucasus, to the Persian highlands, and to 
Afghanistan, from the European moiety was completely 
barred ; while the tribes of eastern central Asia were 
equally shut out from Persia and from India by huge 
mountain ranges and table lands. Thus, if the blond 
long-head race existed so far back as the epoch in which 
the Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean had its full extension, 
space for its development, under the most favourable 
conditions, and free from any serious intrusion of for- 
eign elements from Asia, was presented in northern 
and eastern Europe. 

When the slow erosion of the passage of the Darda- 
nelles drained the Ponto-Aralian waters into the Medi- 
terranean, they must have everywhere fallen as near the 
level of the latter as the make of the country permitted, 
remaining, at first, connected by such straits as that of 
which the traces yet persist between the Black and the 



254 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE!. 

Caspian, the Caspian and the Aral Seas respectively. 
Then, the gradual elevation of the land of northern 
Siberia, bringing in its train a continental climate, 
with its dry air and intense summer heats, the loss by 
evaporation soon exceeded the greatly reduced supply of 
water, and Balkash, Aral, and Caspian gradually 
shrank to their present dimensions. In the course of 
this process, the broad plains between the separated in- 
land seas, as soon as they were laid bare, threw open 
easy routes to the Caucasus and to Turkestan, which 
might Avell be utilised by the blond long-heads moving- 
eastward through the p^.ains, contemporaneously left 
dry, south and east of the Ural chain. The same pro- 
cess of desiccation, however, would render the route 
from east central Asia westward as easily practicable; 
and, in the end, the Aryan stock might easily be cut in 
two, as we now find it to be, by the movement of the 
Mongoloid brunet broad-heads to the west. 

Thus we arrive at what is practically Latham's Sar- 
matian hypothesis — if the term '' Sarmatian " is 
stretched a little, so as to include the higher parts and a 
good deal of the northern slopes of Europe between the 
Ural and the German Ocean; an immense area of coun- 
try, at least as large as that now included between the 
Black Sea, the Atlantic, the Baltic, and the Mediter- 
ranean. 

If we imagine the blond long-head race to have been 
spread over this area, while the primitive Aryan lan- 
guage was in course of formation, its north-western and 
its south-eastern tribes will have been 1,500, or more, 
miles apart. Thus, there will have been ample scope for 
linguistic differentiation; and, as adjacent tribes were 
probably influenced by the same cause, it is reasonable 
to suppose that, at any given region of the periphery the 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 255 

process of differentiation, whether brought about bv 
internal or external agencies, will have been analogous. 
Hence, it is permissible- to imagine that, even before 
primitive Aryan had attained its full development, the 
course of that development had become somewhat dif- 
ferent in different localities ; and in this sense, it may be 
quite true that one uniform primitive Arj^an language 
never existed. The nascent mode of speech may very 
early have got a twist, so to speak, towards Lithuanian, 
Slavonian, Teutonic, or Celtic, in the north and west ; 
towards Thracian and Greek, in the south-west ; towards 
Armenian in the south ; towards Indo-Iranian in the 
south-east. With the centrifugal movements of the sev- 
eral fractions of the race, these tendencies of peripheral 
groups would naturally become more and more intensi- 
fied in proportion to their isolation. aSo doubt, in the 
centre and in other parts of the periphery of the Aryan 
region, other dialectic groups made their appearance; 
but whatever development they may have attained, these 
have failed to maintain themselves in the battle with 
the Finno-tataric tribes, or with the stronger among 
their own kith and kin.'" 

Thus I think that the most plausible hypothetical 
answers which can be given to the two questions which 
we put at starting are these. There was and is an Aryan 
race — that is to say, the characteristic modes of 
speech, termed Aryan, were developed among the blond 
long-heads alone, however much some of them may have 
been modified by the importation of non- Aryan elements. 
As to the " home " of the Aryan race it was in Europe, 
and lay chiefly east of the central highlands and west 



* See the views of J. Schmidt (stated and discussed in Schra- 
der and Jevons, pp. 63-67), with which those here set forth are 
substantially identical. 



256 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

of the Ural. From this region it spread west, along the 
coasts of the Korth Sea to our islands, where, probably, 
it met the brunet long-heads ; to France, where it found 
both these and the brunet short-heads; to Switzerland 
and South Germany, where it impinged on the brunet 
short-heads ; to Italy, where brunet short-heads seem to 
have abounded in the north and long-heads in the south ; 
and to the Balkan peninsula, about the earliest inhabit- 
ants of which we know next to nothing. There are two 
ways to Asia Minor, the one over the Bosphorous and 
the other through the passes of the Caucasus, and the 
Aryans may well have utilised both. Finally, the south- 
eastern tribes probably spread themselves gradually 
over west Turkestan, and, after evolving the primitive 
Indo-Iranian dialect, eventually colonised Persia and 
Hindostan, where their speech developed into its final 
forms. On this hypothesis, the notion that the Celts 
and the Teutons migrated from about Pamir and the 
Hindoo-Koosh is as far from the truth as the supposi- 
tion that the Indo-Iranians migrated from Scandinavia. 
It supposes that the blond long-heads, in what may be 
called their nascent Aryan stage, that is before their 
dialects had taken on the full Aryan characteristics, 
were spread over a wide region which is, conventionally, 
European; but which, from the point of view of the 
physical geographer, is rather to be regarded as a con- 
tinuation of Asia. Moreover, it is quite possible and 
even probable, that the blond long-heads may have ar- 
rived in Turkestan before their language had reached, 
or at any rate passed beyond, the stage of primitive 
Aryan ; and that the whole process of differentiation 
into Indo-Iranian took place during the long ages of 
their residence in the basin of the Oxus. Thus, the 
question whether the seat of the primitive Aryans was 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 257 

m Europe^ or in Asia, becomes very much a debate 
about geographical terminology. 

The foregoing arguments in favour of Latham's 
'' Sarmatian hypothesis " have been based upon data 
Avhich lie within the ken of history or may be surely 
concluded by reasoning backwards from the present 
state of things. But, thanks to the investigations of the 
j^re-historic archa3ologists and anthropologists during 
the last half-century, a vast mass of positive evidence 
respecting the distribution and the condition of man- 
kind in the long interval between the dawn of history 
and the commencement of the recent epoch has been 
brought to light. 

During this period, there is evidence that men existed 
in all those regions of Europe which have not yet been 
proj^erly examined ; and such of their bony remains as 
have been discovered exhibit no less diversity of stature 
and cranial conformation than at present. There are 
tall and short men ; long-skulled and broad-skulled men ; 
and it is probably safe to conclude that the present con- 
trast of blonds and brunets existed among them when 
they were in the flesh. Moreover it has become clear 
that, everywhere, the oldest of these people were in the 
so-called neolithic stage of civilisation. That is to say, 
they not merely used stone implements which were 
chipped into shape, but they also employed tools and 
weapons brought to an edge by grinding. At first they 
know little or nothing of the use of metals; they possess 
domestic anima's and cultivated plants and live in 
houses of simple construction. 

In some parts of Europe litt.e advance seems to have 
been made, even down to historical times. But in 
Britain, Erance, Scandinavia, Germany, Western Rus- 
sia, Switzerland, Austria, the plain of the Po, very 

17 



^58 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

probably also in the Balkan peninsula, culture gradually 
advanced until a relatively high degree of civilisation 
was attained. The initial impulse in this course ol 
progress appears to have been given by the discovery 
that metal is a better material for tools and weapons 
than stone. In the early days of pre-historic arch?eo^ 
logy^ Nilsson showed that, in the interments of the 
middle age^ bronze largely took the place of stone, and 
thatj olily in the latest^ w^as iron substituted for bronze* 
Thus arose the generalisation of the occurrence of a 
regular succession of stages of culture, which were 
somewhat unfortunately denominated the '' ages " of 
stone, bronze, and iron. For a long time after this 
order of succession in the same locality (which, it was 
sometimes forgotten, has nothing to do with chronologi- 
cal contemporaneity in different localities) was made 
out, the change from stone to bronze was ascribed to 
foreign, and, of course. Eastern influences. There were 
the ubiquitous Phoenician traders and the immigrant 
Aryans from the Hindoo-Koosh, ready to hand. But 
further investigation has proved * for various parts of 
Europe and made it probable for others, that though 
the old order of succession is correct it is incomplete, 
and that a copper stage must be interpolated between 
the neolithic and the bronze stages. Bronze is an arti- 
ficial product the formation of which implies a knoAvl- 
edge of copper ; and it is certain that copper was, at a 
very early period, smelted out of the native ores, by the 
people of central Europe who used it. When they 
learned that the hardness and toughness of their metal 
were immensely improved by alloying it with a small 

* " Proved " is perhaps too strong a word. But the evi- 
dence set forth by Dr. Much {Die Kupferzeit in Europa, 1886) 
in favour of a copper stage of culture among the inhabitants 
of the pile-dv/ellings is very weighty. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 259 

quantity of tin, thej forsook copper for bronze, and 
gradually attained a wonderful skill in bronze-work. 
Finally, some of the European people became ac- 
quainted with iron, and its superior qualities drove out 
bronze, as bronze had driven out stone, from use in the 
manufacture of implements and weapons of the best 
class. But the process of substitution of copper and 
bronze for stone was gradual, and, for common pur- 
poses, stone remained in use long after the introduction 
of metals. 

The pile-dwellings of Switzerland have yielded an 
unbroken archaeological record of these changes. Those 
of eastern Switzerland ceased to exist soon after the 
appearance of metals, but in those of the Lakes of Xeu- 
chatel and Bienne the history is continued through the 
stage of bronze to the beginning of that of iron. x\nd in 
all this long series of remains, which lay bare the min- 
utest details of the life of the pile-dwellers, from the 
neolithic to the perfected bronze stage, there is no in- 
dication of any disturbance such as must have been 
caused by foreign invasion ; and such as was produced 
by intruders, shortly after the iron stage was reached. 
Undoubtedly the constructors of the pile-dwellings 
must have received foreign influences through the chan- 
nel of trade, and may have received them by the slow 
immigration of e-:her races. Their amber, their jade, 
and their tin show that they had commercial intercourse 
with somewhat distant regions. The amber, however, 
takes us no further than the Baltic ; and it is now 
known that jade is to be had within the boundaries of 
Europe, while tin lay no further off than north 
Italy. An argument in favour of oriental influence has 
been based upon the characters of certain of the culti- 
vated plants and domesticated animals. But even that 



260 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

argument does not necessarily take us beyond the limits 
of south-eastern Europe ; and it needs reconsideration in 
view of the changes of physical geography and of 
climate to which I have drawn attention. 

In connection with this question there is another im- 
portant series of facts to be taken into consideration. 
When, in the seventeenth century, the Russians advanced 
beyond the Ural and began to occupy Siberia, they 
found that the majority of the natives used implements 
of stone and bone. Only a few possessed tools or weap- 
ons of iron, which had reached them by way of 
commerce; the Ostiaks and the Tartars of Tom, alone, 
extracted their iron from the ore. It was not until the 
invaders reached the Lena, in the far east, that they 
met with skilful smiths among the Jakuts,'^ who manu- 
factured knives, axes, lances, battle-axes, and leather 
jerkins studded with iron ; and among the Tunguses 
and Lamuts, who had learned from the Jakuts. 

But there is an older chapter of Siberian history 
which was closed in the seventeenth century, as that of 
the people of the pile-dwellings of Switzerland had 
ended when the Romans entered Helvetia. Multitudes 
of sepulchral tumuli, termed like those of European 
Russia, '' kurgans," are scattered over the north Asiatic 
plains, and are especially agglomerated about the upper 
waters of the Jenisen. Some are modern, wdiile others, 
extremely ancient, are attributed to a quasi-mythical 
people, the Tschudes. These Tschudish kurgans 
abound in copper and gold articles of use and luxury, 



* Andree, Die Metalle hei den Naturvolkern (p. 114). , It 
is interesting to note that the Jakuts have always been pas- 
toral nomads, formerly shepherds, now horse-breeders, and 
that they continue to work their iron in the primitive fashion r 
as the argument that metallurgic skill implies settled agri- 
cultural life not unfrequently makes Its, appearance.. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 261 

but contain neither bronze nor iron. The Tschudes pro- 
cured their copper and their gold from the metalliferous 
rocks of the Ural and the Altai ; and their old shafts^ 
aditSj and rubbish heaps led the Russians to the redis- 
covery of the forgotten stores of wealth. The race to 
which the Tschudes belonged and the age of the works 
which testify to their former existence, are alike 
unknown. But seeing that a rumour of them appears 
to have reached Herodotus, while, on the other hand, 
the pile-dwelling civilisation of Switzerland may per- 
haps come down as late as the fifth century b. c.^ the 
possibility that a knowledge of the technical value of 
copper may have travelled from Siberia westward must 
not be overlooked. If the idea of turning metals to 
account must needs be Asiatic, it may be north Asiatic 
just as well as south Asiatic. In the total absence of 
trustworthy chronological and anthropological data, 
speculation may run wild. 

The oldest civilisations for which we have an, even 
ajDproximately, accurate chronology are those of the 
valleys of the 'Nile and of the Euphrates. Here, culture 
seems to have attained a degree of perfection, at least as 
high as that of the bronze stage, six thousand years ago. 
But before the intermediation of Etruscan, Phoenician, 
and Greek traders, there is no evidence that they exerted 
any serious influence upon Europe or northern Asia. 
As to the old civilisation of Mesopotamia, what is to be 
said until something definite is known about the racial 
characters of its originators, the Accadians ? As matters 
stand, they are just as likely to have been a group of 
the same race as the Egyptians, or the Dravidians, as 
anything else. And considering that their culture 
developed in the extreme south of the Euphrates valley, 
it is difficult to imagine that its influence could have 



262 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 

spread to northern Eurasia except by the Phoenician 
(and Carian ?) intermediation which was undoubtedly 
operative in comparatively late times. 

Are we then to bring down the discovery of the use of 
copper in Switzerland to, at earliest, 1500 b. c.^ and to 
put it down to Phoenician hints ? But why copper ? At 
that time the Phoenicians must have been familiar with 
the use of bronze. And if, on the other hand, the 
northern Eurasiaties had got as far as copper, by the 
help of their own ingenuity, why deny them the capa- 
city to make the further step to bronze ? Carry back the 
borrowing system as far as we may, in the end we must 
needs come to some man or men from whom the novel 
idea started, and who after many trials and errors gave 
it practical shape. And there really is no ground in the 
nature of things for supposing that such men of prac- 
tical genius may not have turned up, independently, in 
more races than one. 

The capacity of the population of Europe for inde- 
pendent progress while in the copper and early bronze 
stage — the ^' palseo-metallic " stage, as it might be called 
— appears to me to be demonstrated in a remarkable 
manner by the remains of their architecture. Erom the 
crannog to the elaborate pile-dwelling, and from the 
rudest enclosure to the complex fortification of the 
terramare, there is an advance which is obviously a 
native product. So with the sepulchral constructions ; 
the stone cist, with or without a preservative, or mem- 
orial cairn, grows into the chambered graves lodged in 
tumuli ; into such megalithic edifices as the dromic 
vaults of Maes How and New Grange ; to culminate in 
the finished masonry of the tombs of Mycense, con- 
structed on exactly the same plan. Can any one look at 
the varied series of forms which lie between the primi- 



THE ARYAN QUESTION^ ^03 

tive five or six flat stones fitted together into a mere box, 
and such a building as Maes How, and yet imagine that 
the latter is the result of foreign tuition ? But the men 
who built Maes How, without metal tools, could cer- 
tainly have built the so-called " treasure-house " of 
Mycenae, with them. 

If these old men of the sea, the heights of Hindoo- 
Koosh-Pamir and the plain of Shinar, had been less 
firmly seated upon the shoulders of anthropologists, I 
think they would long since have seen that it is at least 
possible that the early civilisation of Europe is of 
indigenous growth ; and that, so far as the evidence at 
present accumulated goes, the neolithic culture may 
have attained its full development, copper may have 
gradually come into use, and bronze may have succeeded 
copper, without foreign intervention. 

So far as I am aware, every raw material employed 
in Europe up to the palseo-metallic stage, is to be found 
within the limits of Europe ; and there is no proof that 
the old races of domesticated animals and plants could 
not have been developed within these limits. If any 
one chose to maintain, that the use of bronze in Europe 
originated among the inhabitants of Etruria and radi- 
ated thence, along the already established lines of trafiic 
to all parts of Europe, I do not see that his contention 
could be upset. It would be hard to prove either that 
the primitive Etruscans could not have discovered the 
way to manufacture bronze, or that they did not dis- 
cover it and become a great mercantile people in conse- 
quence, before Phoenician commerce had reached the 
remote shores of the Tyrrhene Sea. 

Can it be safely concluded that the pala^o-metallic 
culture which we have been considering was the appan- 



264 MAN'S PLACE IN NATtTRE. 

age of any one of the western Eurasiatic races ratli^i* 
than another ? Did it arise and develop among the 
bnmet or the blond long-heads, or among the brunet 
short-heads ? I do not think there are any means of 
answering these questions, positively, at present. 
Schrader has pointed out that the state of culture of the 
primitive Aryans, deduced from philological data, close- 
ly corresponds with that which obtained among the pile- 
dwellers in the neolithic stage. But the resemblance of 
the early stages of civilization among the most different 
and widely separated races of mankind, should warn us 
that archaeology is no more a sure guide in questions of 
race than philology. 

With respect to the osteological characters of the 
people of the Swiss pile-dwellings information is as yet 
scanty. So far as the present evidence goes, they appear 
to have comprised both broad-heads and long-heads, of 
moderate stature.^'' In France, England, and Germany, 
both long and broad skulls are found in tumuli belong- 
ing to the neolithic stage. In some parts of England 
the long skulls, and in others the broad skulls, accom- 
pany the higher stature. In the Scandinavian peninsula, 
nine-tenths of the neolithic people are decided long- 
heads: in Denmark, there is a much larger proportion 
of broad-heads. 

In view of all the facts known to me (which cannot 
be stated in greater detail in this place), I am disposed 

* Professor Virchow has guardedly expressed the opinion 
that the oldest inhabitants of the Swiss pile-dwellings were 
broad-heads, and that later on (commencing before the bronze 
stage) there was a gradual infusion of long-heads among 
them (Zeiischrift fiir Ethnologie, xvii., 1885). There is inde- 
pendent evidence of the existence of broad-heads in the Ce- 
vennes during the neolithic period, and I should be disposed 
to think that this opinion may well be correct; but the ex- 
amination of the evidence on which it is, at present, based 
does not lead me to feel very confident about it. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. ^0^ 

to think that the blond long-heads, the brunet long- 
heads, and the brunet broad-heads have existed on the 
continent of Europe throughout the Recent period : that 
only the former two at first inhabited our islands; but 
that a mixed race of tall broad-heads, like some of the 
Black-foresters of the present day, so excellently de- 
scribed by Ecker, migrated from the continent and 
formed that tall contingent of the population which has 
been identified (rightly or wrongly) with the Belgse by 
Thurnam and which seems to have subsequently lost 
itself among the predominant brunet and blond long- 
heads. 

I do not think there is anything to w^arrant the con- 
clusion that the pala?o-metallic culture of Europe took 
its origin among the blond long-head (or supposed 
Aryan) race; or that the people of the Swiss pile- 
dwehings belonged to that race. The long-heads among 
them may just as likely have been brunets. In north- 
eastern Italy there is clear evidence of the superposition 
of at least four stages of culture, in which that of the 
copper and bronze using terramare people comes sec- 
ond ; a stage marked by Etruscan domination occupies 
the third place ; and that is followed by the stage which 
appertains to the Gauls, with their long swords and 
other characteristic iron work. In western Switzer- 
land, on the other hand, at La Tene, and elsewhere, 
similar relics show that the Gauls foUow^ed upon the 
latest population of the pile-dwellings among whom 
traces of Etruscan influence (though not of dominion) 
are to be found. Ilelbig supposes the terramare people 
to have been Greco-Latin-speaking Pelasgi, and conse- 
quently Aryan. But we cannot suppose the people of 
the pile-dwellings of Switzerland to have been speakers 
of primitive Greco-Latin (if ever there was such a 



206 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

language). And if the Gauls were the first speakers of 
Celtic who got into Switzerland, Avhat Aryan language 
can the people of the pile-dwellings have spoken ? * 

As I have already mentioned, there is not the least 
doubt that man existed in north-western Europe during 
the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is not only 
certain that men were contemporaries of the mammoth, 
the hairy rhinoceros, the reindeer, the cave bear, and 
other great carnivora, in England and in France, but a 
great deal has been ascertained about the modes of life 
of our predecessors. They were savage hunters, wdio 
took advantage of such natural shelters as overhanging 
rocks and caves, and perha|)s built themselves rough 
wigwams; but who had no domestic animals and have 
left no sign that they cultivated plants. In many locali- 
ties there is evidence that a very considerable interval — 
the so-called hiatus — intervened between the time when 
the Quaternary or palaeolithic men occupied particular 
caves and river basins and the " accumulation of the 
debris left by their neolithic successors. And, in spite 
of all the warnings against negative evidence afforded 
by the history of geology, some have very positively 
asserted that this means a complete break between the 
Quaternary and the Recent populations — that the 
Quaternary population followed the retreating ice 
northwards and left behind them a desert which re- 
mained unpeopled for ages. Other high authorities, on 
the contrary, have maintained that the races of men 
wdio now inhabit Europe may all be traced back to the 

* See Dr. Munro's excellent work, The Lake Dwellings of 
Europe, for La Tene. Readers of Professor Rhys' recent arti- 
cles {Ficottish Review, 1890) may suggest that the pile-dwell- 
ing people spoke the Gaedhelic form of Celtic, and the Gauls 
the Brythonic form. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION'. 26T 

Great Ice Age. When a conflict of opinion of this kind 
obtains among reasonable and instructed men, it is geii- 
erally a safe conclusion that the evidence for neither 
view is worth much. Certainly that is the result of my 
own cogitations with regard to both the hiatus doctrine 
(in its extreme form) and its opposite — ^^though I think 
the latter by much the more likely to turn out right. 
But I hesitate to adopt it on the evidence which has 
been obtained up to this time. 

'No doubt, human bones and skulls of various types 
have been discovered in close proximity to joalseolithie 
implements and to skeletons of quaternary quadru- 
peds ; no doubt, if the bones and skulls in question were 
not human, their contemporaneity would hardly have 
been questioned. But, since they are human, the 
demand for further evidence really need not be ascribed 
to mere conservative prejudice. Because the human 
biped differs from all other bipeds and quadrupeds, 
in the tendency to put his dead out of sight in various 
ways ; commonly by burial. It is a habit worthy of 
all respect in itself, but generative of subtle traps and 
grievous pitfalls for the unwary investigator of human 
palaeontology. For it may easily happen, that the bones 
of him that " died o' Wednesday," may thus come to 
lie alongside the bones of animals that were extinct 
thousands of years before that Wednesday ; and yet the 
interment may have been effected so many thousands of 
years ago that no outw^ard sign betrays the difference in 
date. In all investigations of this kind, the most care- 
ful and critical study of the circumstances is needful if 
the results are to be accepted as perfectly trustworthy. 

In the case of the remains found in a cave of the 
valley of the IN'eander, near Dlisseldorf, half a century 
ago — the characters of which gave rise to a vast amount 



MS MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

of discussion at that time and subsequently — the cii'- 
cumstances of the discovery were but vaguely knovv^n. 
The skeleton was met with in a deposit, the loess, which 
is known to be of quaternary age ; there was no evi- 
dence to show how it came there. Consequently, not 
only was its exact age justly and properly declared to be 
a matter of doubt ; but those who, on scientific or other 
grounds, were inclined to minimise its importance could 
put forth plausible speculations about its nature which 
do not look so well under the light thrown by a more 
advanced science of Anthropology. It could be and it 
was suggested that the Neanderthal skeleton was that of 
a strayed idiot ; that the characters of the skull were the 
result of early synostosis or of late gout ; and, in fact, 
any stick was good enough to beat the dog withal. 

As some writings of mine on the subject led to my 
occupation of a prominent position among the bela- 
boured dogs of that day, I have taken a mild interest in 
watching the gradual rehabilitation of my old friend of 
the I^eanderthal among normal men, which has been 
going on of late years. It has come to be generally 
admitted that his remarkable cranium is no more than a 
strongly-marked example of a type which occurs, not 
only among other prehistoric men, but is met Avith, 
sporadically, among the moderns ; and that, after all, I 
was not so wrong as I ought to have been, when I indi- 
cated such points of similarity among the skulls found 
in our river-beds and among the native races of Austra- 
lia." However, doubts still clung about the geological 
age of the various deposits in which skulls of the IN'ean- 
derthal type were subsequently found ; and it was not 
until the year 1886 that two highly-competent ob- 
servers, Messrs. Fraipont and Lohest, the one an ana- 

* See p. 171 of this volume. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. ^60 

tomistj the other a geologist, furnished us with evidence 
such as will bear severe criticism. At the mouth of a 
cave in the commune of Spy, in the Belgian province of 
Kamur, Messrs. Fraipont and Lohest discovered two 
skeletons of the Neanderthal type ; and the elaborate 
account of their investigations which they have pub- 
lished appears to me to leave little room for doubt that 
the men of Spy fabricated the palaeolithic implements, 
and w^ere the contemporaries of the characteristic qua- 
ternary quadrupeds, found with them. The anatomical 
characters of the skeletons bear out conclusions which 
are not flattering to the appearance of the owners. They 
were short of stature but powerfully built, with strong, 
curiously-curved thigh-bones, the lower ends of which 
are so fashioned that they must have walked with a bend 
at the knees. Their long depressed skulls had very 
strong brow ridges; their lower jaws, of brutal depth 
and solidity, sloped away from the teeth downwards and 
backwards, in consequence of the absence of that espe- 
cially characteristic feature of the higher type of man, 
the chin prominence. Thus these skulls are not only 
eminently ^' ^N'eanderthaloid," but they supply the proof 
that the parts wanting in the original specimen har- 
monised in lowness of type with the rest. 

After a very full discussion of the anatomical char- 
acters of these skulls, M. Fraipont says : 

To sum up, we consider ourselves to be in a position to say 
that, having regard merely to the anatomical structure of the 
man of Spy, he possessed a greater number of pithecoid char- 
acters than any other race of mankind.* 

And after enumeratina^ these he continues : 



* Fraipont et Lohest. " La Race humaine de Neanderthal, ou 
de Canstatt, en Belgique," Archives de Biologie, 1886. 



270 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

The other and much more numerous characters of the skull, 
of the trunk, and of the limbs seem to be all human. Between 
the man oi Spy and an existing anthropoid ape there lies an 
abyss. 

^ow that is pleasant reading for me, because, in 
1863, I committed myself to the assertion that the 
j^eanderthal skull was ^' the most pithecoid of human 
crania yet discovered," yet that " in no sense can the 
N'eanderthal hones be regarded as the remains of a 
human being intermediate between men and apes " * 
and '^ that the fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered 
do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that 
lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he 
has, probably, become what he is." f 

As the evidence stood seven and twenty years ago, in 
fact, it would have been imprudent to assume that the 
Xeanderthal skull was anything but a case of sporadic 
reversion. But, in my anxiety not to overstate my case, 
I understated it. The I^eanderthaloid race is '^ appreci- 
ably nearer," though the approximation is but slight. 
In the words of M. Fraipont : 

The distance which separates the man of Spy from the 
modern anthropoid ape is undoubtedly enormous; between the 
man of Spy and the Dryopithecus it is a little less. But we 
must be permitted to point out that if the man of the later 
quaternary age is the stock whence existing races have sprung, 
he has travelled a very great way. 

From the data now obtained, it is permissible to believe that 
we shall be able to pursue the ancestral type of men and the 
anthropoid apes still further, perhaps as far as the eocene and 
even beyond. $ 

These conclusions hold good wdiatever the age of the 

* See p. 172 supra. flbid. p. 175. 

1 " Where, then, must we look for primseval Man? Was 
the oldest Homo sapiens, pliocene or miocene, or yet more an- 
cient? In still older strata do the fossilised bones of an Ape 
more anthropoid or a Man more pithecoid than any yet known 
await the researches of some unborn palaeontologist?" — P, 
208 supra. 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 2*71 

men of Spy; but they possess a peculiar interest if we 
admit, as I think on the evidence must be admitted, that 
these human fossils are of pleistocene age. For, after 
all due limitations, they give us some, however dim, 
insight into the rate of evolution of the human species, 
and indicate that it has not taken place at a much faster 
or slower pace than that of other mammalia. And if 
that is so, we are warranted in the supposition that the 
genus Homo, if not the species which the courtesy or the 
irony of naturalists has dubbed sapiens, was represented 
in pliocene, or even in miocene times. But I do not 
know by what osteological peculiarities it could be deter- 
mined whether the pliocene, or miocene, man was suffi- 
ciently sapient to speak or not ; * and whether, or not, 
he answered to the definition ^^ rational animal " in any 
higher sense than a dog or an ape does. 

There is no reason to suppose that the genus Homo 
was confined to Europe in the pleistocene age ; it is much 
more probable that this, like other mammalian genera 
of that period, was spread over a large extent of the 
surface of the globe. At that time, in fact, the climate 
of regions nearer the equator must have been far more 
favourable to the human species ; and it is possible that, 
under such conditions, it may have attained a higher 
development than in the north. As to where the genus 
Homo originated, it is impossible to form even a prob- 
able guess. During the miocene epoch, one region of 
the present temperate zones would serve as well as an- 
other.. The elder Agassiz long ago tried to prove that 
the well-marked areas of geographical distribution of 

* I am perplexed by the importance attached by some to 
the presence or absence of the so-called " genial " elevations. 
Does any one suppose that the existence of the genio-hyo- 
glossus muscle, which plays so large a part in the movements 
of the tongue, depends on that of these elevations? 



272 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 

mammals have their special kinds of men ; and, though 
this doctrine cannot be made good to the extent which 
Agassiz maintained, yet the limitation of the Australian 
type to New Holland,"^ the approximate restriction of 
the negro type to Ultra-Saharal Africa, and the peculiar 
character of the population of Central and South 
America, are facts which bear strongly in favour of the 
conclusion that the causes which have influenced the 
distribution of mammals in general have powerfully 
affected that of man. 

Let it be supposed that the human remains from the 
caves of the ^Neanderthal and of Spy represent the race, 
or one of the races, of men who inhabited Europe in the 
quaternary epoch, can any connection be traced between 
it and existing races ? That is to say, do any of them 
exhibit characters approximating those of the Spy men 
or other examples of the Neanderthaloid race? Put, in 
the latter form, I think that the question may be safely 
answered in the affirmative. Skulls do occasionally 
approach the Neanderthaloid type, among both the 
brunet and the blond long-head races. For the former, I 
pointed out the resemblance, long ago, in some of the 
Irish river-bed skulls. For the latter, evidence of vari- 
ous kinds may be adduced ; but I prefer to cite the 
authority of one of the most accomplished and cautious 
of living anthropologists. Professor Virchow was led, 
by historical considerations, to think that the Teutonic 
type, if it still remained pure and undefiled anywhere, 
should be discoverable among the Frisians, in their 
ancient island homes on the North German coast, 
remote from the great movements of nations. In their 
tall stature and blond complexion the Frisians fulfilled 

[* Unless I am right in extending it to Hindostan and even 
further west.— 1894.] 



THE ARYAN QUESTION. 273 

expectations; but their skulls differed in some respects 
from those of the neighbouring blond long-heads. The 
depression, or flattening (accompanied bj a slight in- 
crease in breadth), which occurs occasionally among the 
latter, is regular and characteristic among the Frisians ; 
and, in other respects, the Frisian skull unmistakably 
approaches the E'eanderthal and Spy type." The fact 
that this resemblance exists is of none the less impor- 
tance because the proper interpretation of it is not yet 
clear. It may be taken to be a pretty sure indication 
of the physiological continuity of the blond long-heads 
with the pleistocene ^eanderthaloid men. But this 
continuity may have been brought about in two ways. 
The blond long-heads may exhibit one of the lines of 
evolution of the men of the N^eanderthaloid type. Or, 
the Frisians may be the result of the admixture of the 
blond long-heads with ^eanderthaloid men ; whose 
remains have been found at Canstatt and at Gibraltar, 
as well as at Spy and in the valley of the Neander ; and 
who, therefore, seem, at one time, to have occupied a 
considerable area in Western Europe. The same alterna- 
tives present themselves when N^eanderthaloid charac- 
ters appear in skulls of other races. If these characters 
belong to a stage in the development of the human 
species, antecedent to the differentiation of any of the 
existing races, we may expect to find them in the lowest 
of these races, all over the world, and in the early stages 
of all races. I have already referred to the remarkable 
similarity of the skulls of certain tribes of native Au- 
stralians to the N"eanderthal skull; and I may add, that 

* Vircliow Beitrage zur physischen Anthropologie cler 
Deutschen (Ahh. der Eoniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaf- 
ten zu Berlin, 1876). See particularly p. 201 for the full 
recognition of the Neanderthaloid characters of Frisian skulls 
and of the ethnological significance of the similarity, 

i8 



274 MAN'S PLACE IN N AUTRE. 

the wide differences in height between the skulls of 
different tribes of Australians afford a parallel to the 
differences in altitude between the skulls of the men of 
Spy and those of the grave rows of !N'orth Germany, 
^eanderthaloid features are to be met with, not only in 
ancient long skulls; those of the ancient broad-headed 
people entombed at Borreby in Denmark have been 
often noted. 

Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the (][uater- 
nary, or pleistocene, age from our own is immense, and 
it is difficult to form an adequate notion of its duration. 
Undoubtedly there is an abysmal difference between the 
I^eanderthaloid race and the comedy living specimens of 
the blond long-heads with whom we are familiar. But 
the abyss of time between the period at which North 
Europe was first covered with ice, when savages pursued 
mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp 
stones in central France, and the present day, ever 
widens as we learn more about the events which bridge 
it. And, if the differences between the N'eanderthaloid 
men and ourselves could be divided into as many parts 
as that time contains centuries, the progress from part to 
part would probably be almost imperceptible. 

THE EI^D. 



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lV»IiMK,„!ilf CONGRESS 



029 714 078 4 



